The David Pakman Show - BONUS: Government shutdown becomes second longest ever, Kash Patel’s Diwali post met with racism, and more

Episode Date: October 25, 2025

-- On the Bonus Show: The government shutdown becomes the second-longest in history, a Trump nominee is exposed for sending Nazi text messages, Kash Patel’s Diwali post is met with racism, and much more...   Become a Member: https://www.davidpakman.com/membership  Subscribe to our (FREE) Substack newsletter: https://davidpakman.substack.com/  Buy David's book: https://davidpakman.com/book 

Hey, everybody, David here. What you're about to hear is an episode of the bonus show. We do a bonus show every day for our members. And for a limited time, we will release one of the week's bonus shows on Saturdays exclusively for our audio podcast listeners. If you'd like to get access to all of the bonus shows, simply sign up at join packman.com. Here is that bonus show episode. Welcome to the bonus show. The government shutdown is entering week three. This is now the second longest in history at 22 days. No sign of a breakthrough.

Trump's about to go to Asia and Republicans are basically blaming Democrats. The country's not really falling for it. 50% blame Republicans, 41% or something like that, blame Democrats. This is, you know, there's sort of like a game of chicken going on here. And the thing about Trump. and Republicans under Trump, they are way more willing, Pat, to just, like, call people's bluff no matter who stands to be hurt by that. And I think to a degree, that's what's going on with Republicans insisting, listen, Democrats can get this thing reopened any time as soon as they say, we'll just

pass a clean, clean resolution. Democrats are saying, we control nothing. We don't control the White House, the House, the House, or the Senate. And somehow we're the ones getting blamed. Not by a huge margin, but by, you know, seven to eight points. The American people don't buy it. They believe that it is more the fault of Republicans than Democrats, but this one doesn't have an obvious end in sight. Well, I don't know about that because open enrollment is just around the corner that begins November 1st. And if people see that their premiums are expected to skyrocket, maybe double if those Obamacare subsidies lapse, then people may get really upset with the people in Washington

and make it so that lawmakers are incentivized to strike a deal. I feel like early on with these government shutdowns, there's just a lot of finger pointing. There's often no end in sight, but then eventually push comes to shove and we start seeing federal workers go without pay. We start seeing the snap benefits cut as we're seeing happen now. And it gets to a point where it's really just untenable. So I think we're inching closer to that point. It may happen in the next few days or so.

I think that that would be great. And, you know, I am really beyond the political machinations. of it. Is it machinations or mag it's machinations? I always say machinations. Yeah. Maybe you have a choice. I, I for me, it's I don't even care who benefits from the government being shut down. I just want government open and for us to stop being able to, you know, it's like the the government is shut down and they won't swear in at Alita Grahalva. And the government is shut down. But as I talked about on the podcast today, Democrats still decided to to confirm one of Donald Trump's judicial nominees, I kind of want to get back to normal

business and being able to take the government being shut down out of the conversations and also so that my friends who are furloughed and aren't making any money, you can start getting their paychecks again. This just doesn't really benefit the country. Right. I think with these government shutdowns, they start out as just a little nuisance, right? Like maybe there's a section of a national park that you can't go to or you have to cancel some trip or if you're a federal worker, you figure, okay, I may go a couple of weeks without pay and that would be all right, but then anything further than that, I'm going to be in some serious trouble. So it's one of those things where at first things are okay, but as the weeks roll on,

it really does become a very serious issue. And I think we're getting to that point. Now we're going to get to that point, certainly when November 1st comes around. So hopefully that strikes some sense of urgency in the minds of these politicians because the finger pointing eventually is just It's not going to work anymore. You know, we've dealt with shutdowns before in the fall of the year before a midterm. And often we'll talk about, oh, who is this going to help or hurt by the time that I think the political memory is so low that assuming this shutdown ends could be days, could be weeks. I don't think it will be a factor at all in the November of 2026 midterms.

Oh, me neither. I mean, if the midterms were this November, then yeah, they would play some role. And we could even question the degree to which they would play a role. I think other issues would be more important when it comes to what voters prioritize like immigration in the economy, for example, but the government shutdown would still be up there on that list. People are not going to be thinking about this come next year. Maybe we'll have another one of these shutdowns, but it's just not going to be at the top of mind for people. I agree. If you are in the audience and you believe this shutdown, assuming it ends in this calendar year will affect next year's midterms,

Let me know, because I simply do not see it. The Trump administration has another Nazi text problem. Aye, aye, aye. It's happening again. This time it is 30-year-old attorney White House liaison at DHS Paul Ingracia, who is also Trump's nominee or was to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. He was involved in trading Nazi referencing jokes and racist comments with several other Republican operatives. In one in Gracia wrote, he has a Nazi streak in him from time to time. In

others, he mocked Martin Luther King Day as a holiday to toss into hell. He also used slurs against Asian and indigenous people, called for holidays tied to black history, including Juneteenth to be eviscerated. And his lawyer says it was all satirical or manipulated. So, you know, Pat, I don't know if the audience will agree with me on this. I've been in a lot of text and signal chats and while I have never made such comments, there are people in some of these chats who I genuinely know well. And they might make a comment like I have a little Nazi in me sometimes, but it's completely out of context.

Like I'll give you an example. Imagine a text thread with with a bunch of dads about their kids, right? A bunch of my friends all had babies around the same. I'm making this one up, but this is like a totally plausible example. And imagine everybody's like sharing pictures of their kids and someone goes, oh, it looks like your, your baby's eyes are blue and she's got blonde hair. And so, and the dad responds, yeah, hopefully it stays just because they like blue and blonde hair, right?

And then someone goes, ooh, sounds like eugenics. And the dad goes, oh, yeah, I've got a little Nazi in me from time to time. Right. It's very clearly a joke about the Aryan look of blue hair and blonde eyes. And like, that's a hyper specific example where if you just showed me the person's text message with no context, I would go, oh my God, they're a Nazi. But if you show me the whole conversation, I would go, guys, it's obviously a joke. It's very clearly a joke.

That is not the totality of these comments, right, actually advocating for, you know, certain holidays or using racial slurs or this goes beyond that. If it was just, I've got a little Nazi in me sometimes. I actually can imagine context where it's like, guys, it's clearly a joke, but this goes so far beyond that. Right. Or sometimes people will use the term Nazi to mean strict. So like with your example of parents, maybe one of the parents doesn't want to let their kid out after 10 o'clock at night or whatever.

And he says, oh, I have a little Nazi streak in me. And he's essentially saying he's just strict on his kids. Of course, something like that would be okay. So the context does matter when it comes to this. But hearing the defense, the lawyer is saying that the remarks were satirical or manipulated, kind of like, well, which one is it? Take your pick. Whichever one sounds less bad, pick one.

Yeah. And with some of these things, like he says he wants to do away with Martin Luther King Jr. Day and it should be tossed into the seventh circle of hell. And he doesn't like other holidays commemorating black history like Juneteenth. that's honestly like the standard Republican position at this point. When Martin Luther King Day was created, there were a whole bunch of Republicans who were opposed to it. I suppose it's just been normalized at this point. And once again, when June Teeth was created, a lot of these Republicans scoffed at it, don't want it to be a holiday. So I mean, as bad as that sounds,

that actually isn't keeping with what the mainstream Republican parties like today. Without a doubt. Now, this is also, by the way, this kind of reminds me of the Graham Platner situation. Have you been following this, Pat? No, who's that? this guy running for Senate in Maine, Graham Platner. He, um, it was revealed that he, he's a Democrat running as a Democrat. I guess now he says he's a communist. He says that, um, he has a tattoo on his chest that's reminiscent of a Nazi symbol. And he, I guess, I guess the whole idea is he's going to get that removed and he got it without totally understanding what it meant. And then he was confronted with in a Reddit post in the past. He said he wanted to understand why black people don't leave

tips at restaurants. And when he was asked about that on Pod Save America, he basically said, it was a genuine question. I was observing that my black customers didn't really tip me and I wanted to know why. And then there was another one where it was like minimizing rape. And he said that one, I was just an idiot. I was an infantryman coming out of the military and I didn't. And you know, I don't really know that I have an overarching interpretation of these things. I try to be like a thoughtful like look at each one of these one by one. So I'll give you an example. I think that the Al Franken thing for which he ultimately resigned was very much overblown. Al Franken was photographed sort of alluding to touching a sleeping woman's breasts who was wearing

a bulletproof vest sort of thing. He didn't touch her and it was years before he was in the Senate and he ended up resigning because it was a moment in which tensions were running high about that sort of thing. I think that was overblown, for example. Other situations, you know, we evaluate each of them one by one. Um, the Graham Platner thing and the Katie Porter thing, I think are kind of big deals. You know, I think I think that that we really have to take these seriously and people have to think about, okay, did Graham Platner really not know what the tattoo meant and also is it this innocent thing

to say I'm simply trying to understand why my black customers don't tip. I don't know. People should evaluate it, but I don't think we can just go, oh, it was just things people said when they were young. I like, I don't buy that. I don't know. I looked up the tattoo and I didn't recognize it as a Nazi symbol. I don't think I've seen something like this before.

It's a skull with some like a, yeah, it's like a dark image of a skull. So it's not like a swastika or an SS symbol or something like that. So there's a chance. I suppose that he just wanted a skull tattoo and the one that he got looks like a Nazi symbol and maybe there was no ill will on his part. But the comments about observing black customers not tipping, it's going to be hard to defend against that one. I think that's a lot more damaging to someone's political prospects than a tattoo.

Anyway, this kind of gets us back to, I take this stuff really seriously, but are we doing ourselves a disservice by holding our candidates to a different standard than Republicans? I don't know. We've talked about this for a long time. Yeah, but we're the ones that vote for our candidates. We know that we already don't want to vote for Republicans because they don't live up to our standards. So I think it's perfectly acceptable to have reasonable.

standards for Democratic candidates to abide by. And I think saying no Nazi tattoos and no racist comments is a pretty easy standard for most people to live up to. Now, there are people online saying, I like that Graham Platner has all the right policies. And I don't really care about a tattoo. I only care about his policies today, which is like that. I mean, listen, that's a position people can take. It's like taking a thought experiment to the maximum, right? Like if there was a candidate with whom you agreed on policy 100%, but they happened to be a reprehensible person, would you still vote for them? Like, you can make an argument that you still should. But I don't think we live in that world because there are plenty of other people who are

qualified to run for political office who still hold beliefs that we agree with. And so I think it would be better if we ran those people instead. All right. We have another instance of losing control of the monster that you just created. Cash Patel posted about Diwali earlier this week. The administration had a Diwali festival. It is the Hindu festival of lights and Trump did a thing in the Oval Office. And if you look at the comments to Cash Patel's post about this, it's a simple post just saying happy DeWali, 3,000 comments, most of them disgusted by the fact that Cash Patel is Hindu. This is very similar to what recently happened to Vivek Ramoswamy.

We played those clips pat of Vivek, who's now running for governor in Ohio, taking question from sort of Charlie Kirk disciple types who are going, this is a Christian country. We're supposed to be Christian here. You're Hindu. How are you possibly going to reflect the values of blah, blah, blah. This is what happens when you lose control of the monster that you create. There is no better example of it. Yeah.

I mean, I wonder what Cash Patel is thinking right now. Like, will he in the future not post these Thawali messages? Does he accept that the MAGA movement is never going to truly accept? him? Like, what's the thought process when it comes to something like this? Because I think a lot of these Republicans, like Vivek, for example, figured that we had moved on from that sort of racism, that overt racism especially, and that he could still run a successful campaign as an Indian American being on the Republican ticket. But from time to time, we see these instances of these Trump supporters not accepting foreign cultures, people from other countries. So it's really no

surprised that they would also fall victim to some of these attacks because all day Trump supporters are attacking other racial minorities over these things. So I'm sure it's reasonable to assume that it would also extend to members of the Trump administration. There are I encourage people to check out the post, which has over six million views. And there are funny comments like amazing fan base you've cultivated here in the replies cash from people who are pointing out that this is just these are disgusting reactions. And then others who are saying, you are a traitor. This is a Christian country. This is satanic stuff. Not today. Satan. Sorry. This is not a movement that is welcoming of diverse beliefs, no matter how much they want to call themselves the big tent party.

As long as you're not in power, they'll allow you to vote for Trump, essentially. Yeah. I mean, it's important to point out that most people who observe social media, they don't comment, right? They're just going through posts and they're not going to say either way, whether they like it. They're not going to comment on the post. So I'm sure there are plenty of Trump supporters who saw Cash Patel's Diwali message and didn't have an issue with it. They just kept on scrolling. But maybe it is interesting or relevance that the portion that do decide to comment are saying these negative things against Cash Patel. And I think that this is a, you know, when we do a story and I hear from people, I know.

I'm hearing from a subsection of the 1 to 2% that are choosing to write in and that most people I'm simply not hearing from period and I'm not going to. I think that that's just the self-selection bias in terms of who leaves the comments as you're pointing out. Yeah, but it's still interesting how among that subsection, they're all basically saying the same thing, which is that they don't support Cash Patel's religion and they think this is a Christian country, so he shouldn't be posting things like that. What a sad situation for Cash Patel. I think he'll be okay, but obviously it shows the rampant xenophobia that and intolerance that exists in MAGA. All right. We'll be back tomorrow. New show and new bonus show.