The David Pakman Show - Bonus Nba Gambling Scandal Javier Milei Gets Midterm Victory Trump Rules Out Running For Vp

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

-- On the Bonus Show: NBA players face federal charges in a major gambling investigation, Javier Milei wins big in Argentina's midterm elections, Trump rules out running for Vice President in 2028, 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. Some of you may know that. Growing up, I was a huge NBA basketball fan. I would watch just about any game that was on TV, although my favorite was Michael Jordan, and then also separately and concurrently, the Boston Celtics.

And the NBA is now in a massive gambling scandal that has led to criminal investigations. A lot of different interesting things here. So the FBI has announced that 30 people have been charged into separate but related investigations. These individuals include Terry Rosier of the Miami Heat, Damon Jones, former Cleveland Cavaliers player, Chauncey Billups, the head coach of the Portland Trailblazers and also a former player, and a whole bunch of other people. Now there are criminal charges. Each person who is involved has his own timeline with regard to court appearances and the

entire thing. But at its core here, this is about betting. This is about betting both directly, but also in terms of helping other people bet, which sometimes is the way that this is done where insiders have information about injuries or whatever. And it is if you know or suspect that you're giving information to people who are not just going to go, oh, what an interesting piece of information. But if they're going to go and make bets on that basis, you are not allowed to do that according to the NBA's constitution.

Now, there are things that are banned by the NBA, but not. crimes. There are things that are crimes. There's a whole bunch of stuff here. But the allegations are wild pat up to and including faking injuries in order to be taken out of games as related to prop bets or even the ultimate results of the game, which maybe I should explain. You can bet on the results of a game. And typically that's done with a line. So if one team is favored by three and a half points, that means that if you bet on them, they have to win by more than three and a half point. So one thing could be, oh, a player's going to fake an injury to be taken out that will hurt his team and so the team doesn't cover the spread. That's one way to gamble. The other is these prop

bets and you see them in the Super Bowl a lot. These are like ancillary bets. They don't necessarily depend on the result of the game. But it'll be like, oh, at the Super Bowl, does the coin flip come up heads or tails? That would be a prop bet or a side bet. And sometimes that can be about, oh, how many minutes will the player play? And so if the player can get himself taken out by faking an injury, they have an ability to impact the results of these bets. Sometimes they get cut in. Anyway, that's the gist of it, Pat. This is a real problem for the NBA. Oh, it absolutely is. And I suspected that something like this was going on because you can bet on just about anything these days, right? All of these specific stats you can bet on now.

and a player could easily know that, decide, okay, I'm actually doing fine right now, but I'm going to pretend to be injured or I'm going to commit an extra foul or turn over the ball because I know that if I have that stat line, I can make some money off of that information. I can tell a friend of mine who can put a bet on it and maybe give me some of the money after the bet has been settled. So this to me seems like it's probably going on in the other leagues as well. maybe they just haven't caught onto it. And it makes me think that there should be restrictions when it comes to what you can bet on.

So when it comes to prop bets, for example, betting on the Super Bowl coin toss being heads or tails, there are ways for that to be rigged, of course, but if it's a real two-sided coin and it's an authentic flip, I don't think that there's really a problem with having a bet on that. But for something like what color is the Gatorade, there are people who know what color the Gatorade is going to be before they like dump it on the winning coach at the end of the game. So just the fact that that information's out there means that there's the possibility of corruption, right? Because that person filling up the Gatorade tank could place a bet or have their buddy place a bet.

So this just seems like it would obviously be happening, right? The fact that the technology is out there, it's no surprise to me that it's going on. Some of the defendants here, including Billups and Rozier, are maintaining their innocence. I don't know. I don't know how long that's going to last. And obviously they are innocent until proven guilty. I just don't. If they are as implicated as the reporting suggests, simply saying I'm innocent is probably

not going to fly. And maybe there's some kind of nuanced or esoteric explanation. I don't know. But this seems to be also a major problem for these individuals. Oh, absolutely. I mean, worse comes to worst. Maybe they could come up with a Pete Rose type excuse, which is to say, yeah, I was betting, but I was only betting on my team.

to win or for me as a player to perform well. But when we take a look at the allegations and we see maybe people were taking themselves out of the game. When they weren't actually injured, they were faking it. Well, you can't argue that you were playing as hard as you would have otherwise. And that opens them up to a whole bunch of criminal liability. There was an interesting conversation on inside the NBA. And I think it was Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith who were having the conversation about

whether some of the people involved here are, quote, addicted to gambling. Now, I don't want to, like, medicalize it. I'm sure there's some kind of standard about that. But one of the things that was pointed out, which I believe, if I hope I'm like recreating this correctly, Barkley said, these guys were not addicted, but this is really stupid because sometimes the bets were really small amounts of money. And these are like multi, multi, multi millionaires. And Kenny Smith, I think correctly pointed out, oh, that points towards addiction. Like Barclay was saying if they were addicted, they would have been betting large amounts of money.

Kenny Smith said, no, no. The fact that these were not significant amounts of money suggests they were addicted and it was about betting rather than what it could actually do for you financially. I lean more towards that second thing, although I could see Pat how in the same way that when someone gets addicted to a drug, sometimes you need a larger and larger dose to get the same effect. I could also see how addiction would manifest as making larger and more irresponsible bets in order to kind of scratch the edge. So I don't know. Well, what also sets this aside is that it's not just that they're gambling. It's that they're gambling and they know that the

odds are skewed in their favor. So instead of having a 50% shot to win, they may have an 80, 90% shot to win because they're the ones who control it. And I think that power may have gotten to their heads. Maybe they placed one of these bets and influenced the outcome a couple of times and they developed some hubris. They figured that they could keep it going. It worked the first few times. So of course, it's going to keep working. And maybe the money doesn't sound like it's all that significant, but it's basically just free money handed to them. Right. They don't have to work for it. They just have to make sure that they are able to provide that outcome that they're betting on. So even if it is just like pocket change relatively to them, it's still going to be worth it, I think, because they barely have

to do anything. Yeah. That's, That's true. Is it betting if you know the outcome is another, you know, it's an indirect. Obviously, they don't know the outcome, but they have influence or inside information over it. So a major scandal for the NBA, uh, interested to see where it lands. Argentina has seen a landslide victory for the current president and Trump associate. I guess he's an associate. Trump friend. Javier Millet.

His party had a landslide victory yesterday in the midterms. This is, um, suggesting. that something about the totality of what he is doing, including, I guess, as a part of that, the friendship with Trump is helping him. It is people overall like it. And this is, of course, going to allow him to probably get away with more in terms of deregulation and cutting benefits and cutting state spending. Trump congratulated him. And it is, listen, I am people, most, I think, lot of people in the audience know I'm from Argentina. I don't claim to be nonpartisan when it comes to Argentinian elections, but Argentina has been plagued with bad leaders from all over

the political spectrum for a really long time. I am not a mili fan, but I've also, I mean, Kierchner was pathetically corrupt to a degree that is literally criminal. I mean, she was convicted of crimes. I don't, I hesitate to this is a, this is a political success for the current party, but I don't believe that this is going to bring Argentina closer to digging out of the economic mess in which it's been in for decades. Oh, absolutely. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon under any leader because the inflation in particular was so out of control.

Now they're having issues with poverty as they put in these austerity measures. And it's a difficult situation for them to be in for sure, regardless of who's in charge. How much of Trump saying that he was going to give Argentina aid and it was contingent on the election outcome? How much do you think that that played a role in these elections? Because $20 billion is actually a sizable chunk to the Argentinian government. I believe their budget, if the information I have in front of me is correct, is about $110 billion US dollars every single year.

So if Trump is giving them $20 billion, that's like a fifth of the budget. That's an incredible amount of money to be handing over to them. And if the people of Argentina get the sense that, okay, well, this money's only going to come to us if we support Malay and his party that could influence their votes conceivably. I think it is, you know, I don't think that that was dispositive in the ultimate results, but I do think it influenced them. And for all of Trump's talk about foreign election interference, if you're a voter in Argentina, and you hear the American president is going to give us 20 or maybe 40 billion, but only if the current president prevailed.

Couldn't you argue that that's a form of foreign election interference in Argentina? I mean, the legal system is totally different. It doesn't even matter. But just it's what Trump has been saying has been done to him. He's doing it. Yeah, I remember that in the context of the 2016 election because there was a lot of talk about Russia influencing the US election. And it was bad for them to do that.

But I think what was often left out of the conversation was that the US influences elections around the world. We have done that for years and years and years. years and we continue to do that. It's just not a scandal when you find out that we're doing it. And typically, we find more covert methods of exerting our influence. But with Trump, he's just willing to do it all out in the open. He said, here's your 20 billion. And then they're willing to take it. We will see what happens in Argentina, but call me as not particularly optimistic. We played a clip on the bonus show today. I'm sorry, on the regular show today of Donald Trump

talking about running in 2028 and saying, number one, his polls are really good, almost like as a justification for being able to get an unconstitutional third term. He was also asked about, you know, you could run as vice president. And then there are questions as to whether in that scenario, he could serve as president again, different legal opinions about that. But the idea would be the president would resign and Trump could get three years, 364 days as president once again. Others say it would skip him and go to the Speaker of the House. Do we have a defendant? It would have to be questioned by the courts because the thing in question has to do with, well, specifically, if you look at the 22nd amendment, it says that no person shall be

elected to the office of the president more than twice, but it doesn't say anything about serving more than two terms. So that's the loophole that the Trump team would try to use if they go with this method. And I believe the Supreme Court would have to rule on it ultimately. So needless to say, Trump said that the vice president scheme would. be too cute and it wouldn't be right. That was his term. What do you think, Pat? You think Trump is really thinking about trying to get another term one way or the other? I still kind of don't think so. Well, I go back and forth on it. But honestly, this is like the most legitimate

sounding way to get there when he talks about to get that third term, right? Because they could actually come up with the legal strategy to get that done when Trump and his supporters leave it vague as as to how they would go about doing the third term. Of course, that's authoritarian, very worrying. We worry about whether he's just going to use the military to stay in power, if he's going to try to cancel elections. But it seems a lot more realistic to take an approach like this, right, which is to get a court case of the Supreme Court,

see if you can do a scheme like this. It seems like a better solution to him. So I don't know why he's so willing to write it off. Yeah, he's writing off maybe the most plausible path he had to more days in the Oval Office. I, you know, I'm based on Trump's recent posts about the midterms, how the mail in voting needs to be ended immediately and all of this stuff. We're going to cover it tomorrow.

I have a sense Trump's going to do something unusual, but it'll be related to the midterms. And I think the most likely scenario is he declares some kind of national emergency or extenuating circumstance that he will try to use to impact how the midterms are done. But I just don't really think he's going to legitimately go for another term. Do you think it would be a national emergency based on immigration or crime in supposed Democrat run cities? Like, what would be the topic? Because the issue we run into is-

I would lean more towards the latter. Yeah. Well, the only thing is he'll have been president for two years by then. So a lot of these crises, you could argue he owns them at that point. And, you know, he's already saying that he's solved the immigration issue. If he is sending the military to more of these cities, he could argue that that issue as well was solved. So he'll need something in his back pocket to save for the midterms. He's going to need something. But I suspect that there, as I said today, I don't think

they are going to give up what they would define as progress just because pollsters tell them you're about to get crushed here. I think they would do everything they can to try to figure out, especially how to keep control of the House. Yeah, certainly Republicans will Trump may be at a point where he doesn't care all that much because he's seen what he's been able to do even without using Congress. And we've also seen Trump stick his nose up at Congress before. Like when he lost the 2020 election, he didn't care about those two special elections in Georgia because it didn't affect him directly.

So, you know, if things are going well for him and his poll numbers are good, of course he's going to be there with the party and look to have a successful midterms, But if things are going poorly, if his polling is in the gutter, I could also see him just saying, eh, don't even worry about it. I still have another two years as president. We don't need Congress. It's going to be, I don't want to use the word interesting because it like understates the severity. These are going to be potentially cataclysmic midterms.

Let me put it that way. I think these will be. And it's starting very soon. I think the sense I'm getting, especially given how many people are running in primaries and all these things, I think within a week of next. next week's elections. This is going to be a 2026 primary in full swing. Oh, gee.

So we'll have the 2026 midterms in 2025. People complain about the presidential election years getting longer and longer somehow. I guess it's happening with the midterms now. I believe it will be. I believe it will be. All right. Let me know what your thoughts are on any of these stories. Please remember rate the podcast, not the member podcast.

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