The David Pakman Show - GOP prepares for life after Trump as strongman loses control

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

-- On the Show -- The right-wing media ecosystem turns Charlie Kirk into both a saint and a conspiracy object, hollowing out his legacy while the Trump administration exploits his death -- The White House insists Donald Trump is in perfect health while public footage shows cognitive lapses and a presidency increasingly shielded by public relations -- MAGA functions as a cult of personal loyalty to Donald Trump and collapses without him, leaving the Republican Party to repackage the same resentments in quieter forms -- A Democratic House after the 2026 midterms strips Donald Trump of legislative power and turns his presidency into institutional paralysis and constant investigation -- Republican leaders increasingly treat Donald Trump as a liability to manage rather than a leader to follow, quietly building parallel power structures -- New polling shows Donald Trump deeply underwater with independents, signaling midterm danger as congressional allies distance themselves -- The Trump administration follows the classic authoritarian pattern where loyalty replaces competence and governance collapses into chaos -- Donald Trump’s behavior consistently contradicts his rhetoric, revealing a governing style built on performative outrage and quiet retreats rather than real belief -- On the Bonus Show: Producer Pat hosts the Bonus Show 😁 Zippix Toothpicks: Code PAKMAN10 saves you 10% at https://zippixtoothpicks.com 🛡️ Incogni lets you control your personal data! Get 60% off their annual plan: http://incogni.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 (00:00) Start(01:23) Charlie Kirk mythmaking(10:43) Trump perfect health spin(18:44) MAGA as personality cult(26:44) Trump boxed in Congress(35:27) GOP hedges against Trump(42:40) Independents abandon Trump(49:16) Loyalty over competence(56:11) Rhetoric versus reality   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bet mode activated. The scorebed app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking. Nah, no more statistically speaking. I want hot takes. I want knee-jerk reactions. That's not really what I do. Is that because you don't have any knees?

Or... The score bet. Trusted sports content, seamless sports betting. Download today. 19 plus, Ontario only. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you, please go to conicsonterio.ca. We're going to go back today to what happened after Charlie Kirk's assassination and how his own

movement turned him into a conspiracy object and basically erased him in the process. And I'm not talking about his critics. I'm talking about the people who at least used to support him. We're then going to take a look at the bigger picture about presidential health. The White House says Trump is effectively a superhero. Every video we see says something different. And so we're going to talk about who is actually running a president. the country and what the implications are here. I also am ready to make a prediction. I rarely do this, but I'm ready to make one. I believe MAGA dies with Trump at the end of Trump's term or whenever Trump's presidency is over. And I'll explain why this is. And it includes Trump's allies increasingly

treating him like a liability. And I would argue that this authoritarian collapse was inevitable if you look at history. Plus, do Republicans even believe their own rhetoric? at this point and the importance of 2026's midterms in ending Trump's presidents in practice. Also, Don Lemon was arrested in one of the biggest attacks yet on independent media. And we will have full coverage of that on tomorrow's show. They have destroyed the legacy of Charlie Kirk. They've essentially used him and now they're done with him and they have thrown his legacy in the trash. Let me explain what I mean.

This story really starts at Utah Valley University, where Charlie Kirk was under this tent, sort of on stage, not a physical stage, but on stage in the sense of doing an event for Turning Point USA. It's one of these, you know, ask me anything types events. And he is shot in the neck. The shooter is identified as 22-year-old Tyler Robinson. He's arrested. Investigators recover the rifle. And text messages later show Robinson saying he was targeting Charlie Kirk because he had enough of his hatred.

So those are the facts and sort of the circumstances. And that barely lasts a few hours because almost immediately the people who claim to love Charlie Kirk the most started to tear his legacy apart. Now you might say, wait, but what do you mean? I'm going to explain exactly what happened. At first, the response was sort of predictable. grief and anger calls that he is a martyr and a hero and a prophet. And then AI images start circulating where Charlie is glowing and ascending appearing to followers like a modern Jesus going up into heaven.

Trump awards him, a posthumous presidential medal of freedom. We had the stadium full of people memorializing his death as the moment that has maybe saved Western civilization or if he had lived, he was going to save Western civilization. So there was this reverence, but underneath it, there was something else that was happening. And it was suspicion. It was paranoia. It was conspiracy. And it wasn't really coming from his critics.

It really increasingly has come from Charlie Kirk's own side. And now with a few months of distance, we can go back and look at the hit job that they essentially did on his legacy from the beginning. When the FBI released the shooter's texts, right-wing commentators, some said, these feel kind of fake. It's scripted. It's too clean. It's too convenient. The idea that one lone kid would do this or could do this, it didn't really sit right with them. So they started the rewrites of the story. Candice Owens openly saying, Israel was involved. No caveats, not quietly saying it, just like Israel was involved. He was about to turn on his support for Israel and others echoed it. The Mossad was involved or the CIA or the deep

state. It kind of doesn't matter, right? It's like a pick your villain, pick your own adventure sort of thing. And then the timing was folded in, right? Around the 9-11 anniversary. So it must be that something bigger is going on. And this is kind of how the logic or lack of logic works now. Then came the YouTube videos. Freeze frame breakdowns like the Zapruder film of the killing of John F. Kennedy with so-called ballistics experts who aren't really experts and people claiming Charlie couldn't have been shot from where the police say he was shot and videos insisting the bullet came

from behind or the other side or not where investigators said the bulls. said the bullet came from. Others said, oh, well, there must have been multiple shooters. If you listen carefully, you hear multiple shots or the shooter was just a patsy that they found. Remember, by the way, that anecdotally, we've looked at some of these claims. We did a video ourselves about the he was really shot from behind thing. And I found the claims to be completely without merit. They didn't feel compelling or accurate in any way. And so where we ended up was with a lot of the same people who spent years mocking conspiracy culture now producing Zapruder-style conspiracy films about Charlie Kirk. So then we've got that. But then it got even worse. AI started making things even

more confusing. And X's, the former Twitter, X's AI system misidentifies suspects and generates distorted enhanced images that aren't really enhanced. And at one point, even law enforcement shares incorrect visuals before pulling them back and every one of these mistakes becomes fodder for the conspiracy theorist. Oh, law enforcement shared an image and took it back. Clearly there's a cover up. So we end up in this situation where nothing is real, which I write about in my book, the echo machine. The shooter's not really the shooter. The motive's not really the motive. The evidence isn't really evidence. The death itself, according to some corners of the internet, wasn't real with videos purporting to show Charlie Kirk after the shooting showing up in Japan

or I don't even remember where the hell it was. And this is the part that really is the crux of what I'm talking about. If you actually believed that Charlie Kirk mattered, if you believed that his ideas mattered, you wouldn't need to erase the reality of what happened to honor him. You wouldn't need to say it was the Mossad or Netanyahu and Bill Ackman were worried he would turn on Israel so they had him killed or any of that stuff. You wouldn't need to do it. You wouldn't need to say that there are fake texts or secret shooters or any of it. But the thing is that the modern right wing doesn't know how to process anything without turning it into a cinematic narrative.

It can't just be what it was. They don't want a political assassination carried out by a disturbed individual. They want a story where their side is so important and so threatening that it had to have been shadowy global forces that intervened. And in this process, what they do is they hollow out Charlie Kirk. He's no longer a real person when this is what they do to him, who had a real political project, which by the way, I opposed. You might say, wow, David, it sounds like you're defending Charlie Kirk. No, no, no, no. This is a critique of how the right handles these situations.

He had a real political project that I strongly disagreed with. But instead, that was erased and Charlie Kirk's death was turned through the conspiracies and the fearmongering and all of this other stuff into a kind of canvas for grievance content. And that destruction of reality turns out to be really useful. Because while there were people spiraling into conspiracies, the Trump administration moved with total clarity. Trump and J.D. Vance immediately call it an assassination by the radical left. In the vacuum of conspiracy that was opened up by the followers of Kirk, Trump was able to come out and say, this is domestic terrorism. We've got to go after Antifa at its headquarters, which, of course, there is no such thing.

They use it to justify crackdowns on speech and on liberal groups. And so Trump sees the opportunity, no ambiguity at all. Now compare that to what happens a few months later, meaning nowish. Renee Good, 37-year-old, killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. There's video. She's unarmed. She's calm. She says, I'm not mad at you, bro, seconds before she gets shot.

And suddenly, the administration is allergic to caution. Before any investigation, Trump and Van Say, she is a domestic terrorist. They defend the agent. They say there's complete and total immunity. No stadium memorial, certainly no medal, no conspiracy about secret forces conspired to target innocent people. It's totally normal behavior by the officer made sense clean. So we've got two deaths here, Charlie Kirk and Renee Good, two different narratives. Charlie Kirk is turned into a saint by the state and an object of conspiracy by his.

his own supporters. Renee Good just gets erased. And that's it. That's like the final sick irony here, which is that Charlie Kirk built a media ecosystem that thrived on suspicion and confrontation and humiliation. Politics as a game. Truth is optional and outrage was Charlie Kirk's currency. And when he died, that very same ecosystem that he helped build completely consumed him

and his legacy. It wasn't the left. It wasn't critics. It was his own side, including people like Candace Owens. His legacy has been fragmented and monetized to death. And that maybe is like the most revealing part of this entire story, which is that in this political culture that MAGA has completely perverted, even the martyrs don't get peace when they are declared martyrs.

They end up being content generation machines. And now they have really come full circle with the destruction of Charlie. Kirk's legacy, a legacy, which includes being the victim of completely inappropriate violence that I have denounced to someone who disagreed with everything that he stood for politically. You know, if you only read White House memos and listened to Caroline Levitt, Donald Trump is basically a marvel character. He has unmatched energy. He has perfect cognition.

He's a tireless worker with the most elite motor skills and an absolutely perfect golf swing. But as soon as you see a picture of Trump or as soon as you watch. a video of Donald Trump walking around or you see him slurring his way, barely awake through speeches and meetings and conferences, you start to say, wait a second, am I really being given the truth? And this is the sort of weird split screen reality of early 2026. On one screen, it's Trump the impenetrable alpha, strong fortress. And on the other screen, it's the actual footage of an increasingly weak, disheveled, and

dilapidated Donald Trump. Now, there was a while where the gap between what we were told about Trump's health and what we saw, there was always a gap since he's been in the political world, but it was a narrower gap. But the gap has widened because he clearly is deteriorating and they are becoming increasingly hyperbolic about how healthy they claim he is to the point where the gap is now impossible to miss. Now, the administration keeps pointing to the same thing as proof that everything's fine. He aced multiple cognitive tests. He got a 30 out of 30. on the brain screening Montreal cognitive assessment, it's case closed and that is it. And so Caroline Levitt gets to walk around saying his mental sharpness is second to none.

The rambling isn't really rambling. It's the weave. And it's an incredibly genius technique to connect complex ideas for other people to understand. But then you watch a speech and he's talking about who the hell knows what. everything from, you know, his uncle John Trump was big on nuclear and something about the Unabobber and all this different stuff. And in another moment, during a diplomatic briefing, he mixes up Azerbaijan and Aberbaijan and Albania and Armenia and Armenia and Iceland and Greenland multiple times. And it happens again and again and again. And then we get to the speech patterns, which we've

now looked at in a lot of detail. His vocabulary. is dramatically diminished. He often trails off. His sentences dissolve into and many other things as he forgets what he's even talking about. He repeats a lot of the same phrases. He glitches with his shoulder when he struggles to find a word. And he struggles with these phonemic paraphas that we've talked about before. You can call it a weave if you want or you can tell people you're smart enough to look with your own eyes and decide what's going on here. We then get to the physical side of his deterioration. You know, the White House doctor says Trump is essentially a robust athlete is what we are

meant to believe. Active lifestyle and regularly winning golf tournaments and completely normal physical and neurological function. But then you watch the videos. And you see these clips where Trump's, Trump's right leg is. dragging as he takes this wide-based gate and the right leg swings like a semi-circle. One of the most viral examples is from just a few months ago when he was walking with his grandson. And clinical experts have pointed out that that kind of movement can signal a pretty serious

neurological issue. Could be a previous stroke. Could be frontotemporal dementia where a side of the body is acting kind of like a dead weight. We look at Trump's face. Remember the pictures from the 9-11 anniversary that shows what looks like a droopy slanted mouth with extraordinarily asymmetrical movement. White House says he was tired. Tired's getting a lot of work lately, especially when we are told he's never tired. He only needs four hours of sleep.

That's all it is. And then we get to the numbers. We've had claims over the last year, two years, that Trump is six foot three and his weight is somewhere in the high two teens, like 219, or maybe it's. like 224 or something like that. That means Trump's lost a lot of weight, number one, all while eating fast food and supposedly drinking gallons of whole milk, according to his claims at the milk summit. So that seems extraordinarily difficult to believe. And of course, if you look at pictures of Trump from years past and now, it certainly doesn't

look like he's lost a whole bunch of weight. So where we get is a Trump in 2026 that despite claims of endless vitality and virility and strength and stamina, he is allegedly working a significantly diminished schedule as we see and hear the deterioration. You'll remember that when it came out that Biden was like doing a 10 to 4 or something like that, trying to keep events to 10 to 4. The Trump team, Trump wasn't president then, of course, Trump, the candidate and the Trump team, said that that is not the schedule of someone that is operating on all cylinders.

Now Donald Trump is reportedly doing an even more restricted schedule 12 to 5. Of course, they deny it. But you look at the calendar and you see that it is mostly true. Multiple reports and we see videos of Trump dozing off. There was the cannabis reform press conference. There was the Milk Summit cabinet meetings. And the White House says sometimes he closes his eyes. And he reflects because he's so engaged with.

And so. Sorry, I almost fell asleep there. He's not sleeping is what they tell us. So we have an incredible split screen right now. On the left side, metaphorically, it's perfect cognition, robust health, an incredible athlete with unmatched energy. And then the video comes in and we say, this guy is extraordinarily confused. He's inventing history.

He's confusing geography. He's dragging his leg, his face droops. His bruised hands are covered in makeup and bandage. And he disappears after dinner and sometimes falls asleep during it. So if you just go by the memos, this is a superhero. If you watch the video, you see a guy who clearly, clearly is being protected by a fortress of public relations. And so for me, the question anymore, the question is no longer is Trump healthy?

It's who's actually in charge of the country from 5 p.m. until noon the next day. And will we ever learn the truth about Trump's health before it's too late if you know what I mean? Leave me a comment. Make sure you're subscribed on the YouTube channel. YouTube.com slash the David Packman Show. If you're trying to quit cigarettes or vaping, one of the first practical questions is what you replace them with, especially if you're not yet ready to eliminate the nicotine. out our sponsor Zipix nicotine toothpicks. Zipix uses quality plant-derived nicotine with a very

short list of ingredients. It gives you another option for managing nicotine with no smoke or vapor. Zipix comes in six flavors. There's two or three milligram options, lets you control the nicotine as compared to a cigarette or vape. They're also easy to use throughout the day and in places where smoking or vaping isn't allowed or it would require you to step out, conspicuously for a cigarette, which can cause other problems. Zipix also offers caffeine and B12 toothpicks if you're reducing nicotine altogether or don't even use it at all. If quitting cigarettes or vaping is your goal, try Zipix nicotine toothpicks. Get 10% off your first order with code Pacman at Zipix toothpicks.com. The link is in the description. You must be 21 or older to

order. is an addictive chemical. I am ready to declare that it is going to end and MAGA will die with Donald Trump's presidency ending January 20th of 2029 or sooner if it happens to end sooner for any reason. Now, I am not making this prediction because the anger of MAGA is going to disappear. I am not making this prediction because Republicans are suddenly going to reform themselves when Trump is finally gone. I'm saying this because MAGA as a movement, I don't believe can exist without the one person that it is built around.

And it is becoming increasingly clear, including as we hear from Trump supporters that they don't really want J.D. Vance to be the nominee in 2028. I don't think that they are going to be able to pull it off. Now, let me give you some of the context. And a lot of the stuff, we've kind of been talking about this for a decade. MAGA is not really an ideology. MAGA isn't conservatism.

It contains elements of nationalism, but fundamentally, it isn't nationalism. A lot of the stuff that Trump does is actually much better for other countries than the United States. It uses populist rhetoric, but it's not really populism in any coherent sense. As soon as Trump got into power, all of the lip service paid to the populist rhetoric went out the window or down the toilet, and Trump did what was best for big corporations and his rich friends and dictators in other countries. And there's no really stable set of beliefs that would survive disagreement if MAGA really starts

arguing about it. There's really only one rule to MAGA. Loyalty to Donald Trump. Whatever Trump says today becomes the position of MAGA. And if he says something different tomorrow, then it's a different thing that MAGA believes. Tariffs are good until they're bad. Vaccines are great when Trump wants credit for developing them. but then all of a sudden they are woke poison that RFK Jr. is going to say, definitely don't

give to your kids. An institution is corrupt until it starts serving Trump and then it's great. Think FBI, Federal Reserve, whatever. That is not a political philosophy. That is personal allegiance to Donald Trump. Personal allegiance to Trump can't survive Trump by definition. Every attempt to start orienting the ship towards a successor so far is proving the point. You have people that try to copy the style or the insults or the grievances of Trump.

And it really doesn't catch on because Trump voters don't want someone to sound like Trump. They want Trump. They don't follow Trump because he reflects their views. They adopt Trump's views because he dominates the space and they do whatever he says. And that is a kind of, I guess you could call it like authority that you can't inherit. from Trump. Trump can't transfer that loyalty and authority. I believe it disappears when Trump disappears. Now, MAGA also requires something else that Trump uniquely provides, a place to dump failure. When Trump loses, it's never really a loss. It is, oh, it was rigged. I was betrayed. There's a conspiracy. Trump will absorb a defeat and turn it into a persecution where he's

almost a martyr. And without him, there's not going to be a central figure to do that work. I don't believe the anger of MAGA will unify and martyr someone else the way Trump has been able to turn himself into a martyr. I think it'll turn inward. Maga will turn it against itself. And what you're going to see is unified loyalty to Trump will fragment into infighting within MAGA. There will be purity tests. Wait a second. Are you really part of the movement if you believe X versus Y. It used to be simple. You're with Trump. That's cool. That's all it is. But they're going to try to make a grievance movement, which is what MAGA really is, that no longer has its Messiah. And I think that it is going to fracture. Now, then we get to the part that Republicans don't really

like to say out loud. Maga is bad for business once Trump is gone. Political parties exist to win power. Maga regularly loses suburban voters. It repels younger voters. It terrifies donors who want predictability. And as long as Trump exists, Republicans tolerate it because he controls the base. He's in charge. He's either the former president, the wannabe president, or president again. And when Trump is gone, that calculation is going to change.

I don't believe the MAGA brand will be an asset after Trump is gone. It'll be a really lame liability. And people will start to realize how cringe and. terrible it always was. And I think Republicans are going to move on. Now, remember, a lot of Republicans haven't moved on only because they don't want Trump's ire turned against them. That's all it's going to be. Now, there are obvious objections to some of this. One example is Trump didn't create MAGA out of nothing. There was already resentment. There was xenophobia, scapegoating of immigrants and all this different stuff. Trump coalesced it. The backlash was there. The distrust of institutions

was there. Trump lit a match. That's all he did. He didn't spread the fuel around. He just lit a match. And I think that that's where a lot of people get this wrong. It's been over 10 years. MAGA today in 2026 is not the same thing as the forces that created MAGA back in 2015. Maga is a brand based around a cult of personality. It requires Trump's voice, shamelessness, and Trump's ability to make contradictions and double standards completely irrelevant. Without Trump, it doesn't continue as what it's been for the last 11 years. Something will probably survive, but it's not going to be magatrumism. Now, I also am not saying that after Trump, Republicans become normal.

And it's like a party that's just John McCain's and Mitt Romney's. I don't think that they're going to become principled or anything like that. They will probably become quieter and more disciplined and sort of less. openly ridiculous and probably more institutionally dangerous as well. Fewer red hats, fewer unhinged, swollen, soaking wet rallies, but probably more policy, better use of the courts and more bureaucracy. The resentments will be there, but they're going to repackage it into language that sounds a little less unhinged and a little more respectable.

Maga will die because it can't exist without Trump at the center of it. But the conditions that produced MAGA aren't going to go away. and I believe 11 years on, it will then be 14 years on, they will mutate, adapt, and they're going to move on. That is where we get to Democrats. Democrats cannot afford to make the mistake of confusing the end of MAGA with the end of the problem. In fact, and I hate that this is the likely reality, Democrats might have a tougher time. If and when Republicans start acting a little less wacky and start being a little more careful about how to get things done. So we can celebrate the impending collapse of the brand, but we shouldn't ignore the forces that are underneath it because in a sense, ignoring the dangers of these movements was how we got into this mess in the first place.

So I believe MAGA dies with Trump. What comes next won't be an empty space. It won't be Mitt Romney and John McCain type Republicans taking over the party. It'll be colder and quieter and more calculated. and we are going to have to be better prepared to fight them because they will spend less time with ridiculous rallies during which Trump glitches and twitches and glitches and short circuits and they're going to spend more time actually getting shit done. Disagree with me? Let me know in the comments. Send me an email info at david packman.com. I'd love to hear from you. A lot of people are

talking about this upcoming midterm election that's just a few months away now like it's any midterm election and it really is not because if Democrats take the House in 2026, that is basically the end of Donald Trump's presidency in any meaningful sense. And Donald Trump understands it. Trump doesn't do well with this. Trump doesn't do well with checks or balances or people telling him no because Trump's entire political identity is built on dominating other people and on the idea that he's the guy who controls everything and everybody else is weak. If he wants Republicans to control the house for two more years, then it should happen. And if that is taken away, because voters, as we hopefully will, will say we are taking the house from Republicans, Trump will be shattered. A Democratic house ends the

fantasy of Trump of controlling everything until he is no longer president. And the moment he loses the house, and I hope that we realize that that's happening on the evening of Election Day, November, the legislative agenda is dead. No. Tax cut packages, no sweeping deregulation getting through Congress, no law to brag about and they say, we did so good that you got to vote for Republicans in 2028. Trump becomes an executive order president, which is political speak for someone who announces things and then watches to see if a court or Congress will actually allow what to happen. Even this Supreme Court, which is totally whacked, has signaled that executive power is not

infinite. So Trump goes from, I run the country to I hope this memo sticks. And that is before you get to the ego part. Trump's power is psychological. Foreign leaders treat him as powerful because they think that he controls Congress. Republican governors pretend Trump is untouchable because they think he could punish my state legislatively. Donors line up for as long as they believe Trump is the future of something. If they lose the house in just a few months, overnight, that is going to change. Foreign leaders will ignore Trump even more than they already do. Governors are going to start freelancing and doing their thing. Republicans in Congress will have to start planning for life after Trump. The money will start hedging. I don't know about giving more

money to the people Trump says they're good because I don't know that they're going to have a job soon. He becomes a president that everybody knows has no power. Trump cannot handle being ignored. He must be feared and worshipped. Now we add oversight. And this is what I hope that our audience is relating to the significance. Trump will still be president. We probably won't have the Senate. But I hope that people do understand the power of the House. A Democratic House means Democratic committee chairs with subpoena power. Hearings on everything. Department of Homeland Security. The ICE fiasco, the Minneapolis stuff, Doge spending with Musk and for a period, Ramoswamy, cabinet communications, Trump's taxes, again, foreign deals again, donors, Epstein, whatever Trump's kids are up to this week to try

to take more money from the American people. The presidency becomes a courtroom drama where the subject will be the misdeeds of the last, then it will be 11 years of Donald Trump. Trump's self-image is that he's the main character of reality. Oversight by. Democrats, if they take the House, is going to flip that. Trump will go from being the narrator or the storyteller to the guy dodging testimony. We saw how Trump reacted to losing the House in 2018, when he shut down the government for weeks because he could not handle losing leverage. That was Trump in his first term. Now Trump is obsessed with legacy. The ballroom he wants to build and acquiring land and changing the names of institutions.

This is legacy and revenged. Revenge. And he wants to be seen as strong. So my expectation if Democrats take the House in November will be daily meltdowns from Trump, the likes of which we have not seen yet. I know sometimes he posts 200 times to truth social overnight. I think that will pale in comparison to what will become Donald Trump's daily reality. If Democrats take the house, you will hear conspirators.

Conspiracy theories about how Democrats won the election. You will see erratic executive actions. You're going to see loyalty purges. If people Trump starts to believe they screwed me and you are going to see not nonstop Fox News tantrums. These are not people who like power being checked. They like power being adored and being allowed to do whatever he wants to do. And the part people miss is that this is not like a big fantasy scenario.

I'm not telling you we're going to get Trump out of office early. I'm not even telling you that Democrats are going to take the Senate. I'm simply saying historically, the incumbent party loses the midterms. Trump specializes in overreach, tariffs, the immigration stuff, the economic whiplash, the authoritarian rhetoric, the whacked out foreign policy. Republicans are in a position of defending districts, Trump barely won in 2024. And those voters are saying, hey, prices are up rather than down. Things are unstable.

I see Trump spending a ton of money overseas, but what about here? And so you've got nonpartisan models right now projecting a 25 to 28 seat swing towards the Democrats. Democrats only need a few seats to take the gavel. This is not a blue wave. This is a light breeze that would be required for Democrats to take the gavel. But 25, 28 seats. And by the way, that's a conservative prediction.

That's based on right now. What happens over the next nine months could make it a 40 seat swing. Some people are talking about a 60 seat swing. a stretch, not impossible, but that's a stretch. So if Democrats take the House, the last two years of Trump's presidency is defense, panicked, terrorized defense, impeachment inquiries, hearings, cabinet officials resigning or under investigation, legislation killed, foreign leaders ignoring Trump more than they already do. And of course, Republicans prepping for a pro-Trump world. Even if the Senate blocks impeachment, it does not matter or acquits on impeachment is what I mean.

Impeachment is a branding disaster for someone whose brand is invincible strong man, but he's been impeached twice. And instead it will just be, I've got to explain, explain why this is not good, explain why that's not okay to be doing to me. And he will get nothing done. 2027 and 2028 will be the year of just posting to truth social, maybe testifying, and of course, an administration that will have to fight investigations instead of transforming the country. And that is a really good thing because the way they would transform the country would be bad for most of us. So I don't see 2026 as just another midterm. It is potentially the expiration date on Trumpism is January 20th, 2029. But the expiration date on Trump's second term as anything other than throwing ketchup at the wall,

literally and metaphorically, is potentially just nine months away. And Trump can scream and post and threaten and tantrum, but a Democratic House is going to turn this presidency into two years of institutional humiliation. And we've got to make it happen. Most scammers rely on information that's already public. Your name, address, phone number, family connections. A lot of that is online and available to be scraped and abused. Our sponsor Incogni reduces the risk by removing you from the internet wherever that personal data appears.

It works across many types of websites, not just one category. So scammers have fewer ways to piece things together about you. Incogny automatically submits removal requests to hundreds of sites on your behalf. But the standout feature is custom removals where you find your information on any website, even one not in their database. You paste the link and Incogni's team will get to work to remove it. I can tell you I've personally been getting way fewer scam and spam calls and messages. Ever since I started using Incogny, you can accomplish a lot quickly with Incogny.

Protect yourself before your data is used against you. get 60% off when you go to incogny.com slash Pacman and use the code Pacman. The link is in the description. As we continue to explore what the Republican Party might look like after Donald Trump, one of the things that we can start to take a look at is how some of Trump's own allies are treating him now when even some of the sycophants, some of the true believers, or at least apparent true believers that we thought would never turn on the guy, are starting to treat him kind of like crap because something big has changed and I think a lot of people are missing it. So, so let's talk about it.

For a bunch of years of MAGA and Trump, the story was pretty simple. Trump's the commander of the MAGA movement. He spoke and they followed. He tweeted and they scrambled. He insulted someone and the party line would just line up and defend it. That era is over. Now not completely, not completely. But a year into Donald Trump's second term, it's a very different feel.

Trump is not being treated like a leader to be followed off a cliff by elected Republicans anymore. Remember, we've already talked about the cultish nature of Trump and how all of this relates to the followers. But Donald Trump by the Republican elected class is being treated like a liability you have to manage. And you can see it if you stop listening to the words and you start looking at the body language and the pauses and the hedging.

And so the Greenland fiasco is an interesting one. goes to the world economic forum, confuses Greenland and Iceland three times, calls himself daddy to the Arctic and starts threatening tariffs on Denmark. Classic Trump chaos, nothing new so far. But look at the Republican response. Back in 2017, Republicans would have turned this into a 10 point foreign policy doctrine based around the Greenland stuff, the Denmark tariffs, all of it. They would have gone on Fox News explained why this is a genius idea. And now it's a little bit different. You've got a lot of people who are sort of like Trump's got ideas, not clear if they're

going to succeed. And you saw a little bit of that on Fox News. Of course you have senators in the Republican Party like Lisa Murkowski and Tom Tillis, who have moved way beyond this. And they're saying, we are not doing any of this. They want legislation to strip Trump of tariff authority. They said they would never allow any kind of resolution that would impose force, use of force on Greenland to go forward. So it's not necessarily Trump sucks.

It's also not mild concern. It's here is what we are doing to take away Trump's ability and power to do A, B, and C, and here's how we're going to do it. So then we look at the interviews. When Republican leaders are asked about the Greenland doctrine or Epstein files or whatever Trump's latest, tariff idea is. There's this lag. They kind of like pause for a second and you might go, oh, are they short circuiting? It's the pause sort of like of a daycare worker trying to explain to a toddler why throwing that block at little Susie's head wasn't okay. And this is kind of happening everywhere. On News Nation, we looked at clips. Trump asked about an American hostage in Afghanistan,

Dennis Coyle. And the host very clearly says the name. And Trump goes, who are we talking about? like his brain just isn't processing it. Then the surrogates go on TV and they're not saying, oh, Trump has a plan to get Dennis Coyle out. They say instead, oh, Trump's focused on the broader framework of global security. They don't defend the minutia anymore. They try to pivot and they try to get off onto different topics because they hear that Trump is talking nonsense and they realize they just can't launder it anymore. And by the way, it may not be good for them electorally to keep laundering it as Donald Trump is going to be phased out as we approach one 2029 and Republicans are going to have to figure out what do our political lives look like

after Trump. So it's important to pay attention to what they're not saying and instead uh and also pay attention to the corrections and the hedging and the way they talk around Trump instead of through him. So I believe that this is a core shift in how the Republican party is now dealing with Trump. In a normal administration, the president is the source of the decisions. He said it, okay, trickles down. We figure out how to defend it. Here it's a little bit different. You know, you got people like J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Republican study committee, they are kind of building a parallel policy framework that will likely diverge from Trumpism to the extent that Trumpism is policy as soon as Trump seems irreversibly weakened.

Trump is weakened right now. But I think Republicans are still wondering, is it irreversible? reversible. Is this still the guy who's going to hold the cards in 2026 for our re-elections? And the answer is he still might be. Once we get beyond 26, especially if Trump and Republicans lose the House, and that's a scenario we're going to dive deep into in a little bit, you are going to see a different approach for sure where Republicans won't wait for orders anymore. They won't wait for the message that comes down from on high. They're going to say, let's build our own power centers. A lot of them, because they're so self-suffer. centered and egomaniacal will say, maybe I could be the new power center post Trump.

So these are not loyalists in the cult way. Most of the cultists are not elected Republicans at the national level. Some of them are, but not like Nancy Mace, I guess is. And there are some. But the cultists are mostly in the followers. The electeds seem to know that this is strategy and tactics. And the moment your allies start treating you like someone who needs to be managed, That mystique of the strong man starts to collapse.

Authoritarian leaders, if you look at history, have survived scandal many times. That's not unique that authoritarian leaders survive scandal. They can also survive incompetence. What they can't survive is being seen as weak, confused or a liability to their own side. When the authoritarian is so strong that no one would dare cross him, well, that's one scenario. When the authoritarian is orange on some days, yellow on others, bruised hands, confused, disoriented, flipping back and forth from one policy to its opposite, you no longer are projecting that strength. You project weakness and confusion and being a liability. So don't expect to

Republicans, don't don't expect that Republicans are going to publicly rebel in large numbers all at the same time. If Fox News doesn't just fully turn on him and all of that, there's not going to be a moment where every Republican turns on the guy. But you're going to see the shifts. You'll see some Fox hosts start to question. You'll see the body language changes we've been seeing, the policy maneuvering and quietly behind the scenes trying to figure out. How can I grab power for myself? This is the difference at the end of the day between a party that follows a leader and a party that is allowing the leader to keep speaking while they're building life boats overnight while the leader sleeps so that they're ready to hit that proverbial eject button. When the sycophants are planning

for life after you, the clock is ticking. And I think it's very clear that that's what's going on right now with Trump. Now, let me ask you the following question. Other than the movement around J.D. Vance, which whether Trump supports Vance or not as the heir to the Maga throne, There's a movement around Vance. It includes Peter Thiel, for example. I expect that to be a group of people that tries to sort of take the power. Who else do you believe is likely to try to take Trump's power as Trump phases out after the 2026 election?

Is it Don Jr.? Is it going to be a member of the House, a member of the Senate? Is there a Republican governor? Let me know what you think. Leave a comment. Of course, hit the like button. and make sure you're subscribed on YouTube. But leave me a comment.

Where do you think the power center may lie in the Republican Party once Trump is gone? Donald Trump has just hit a new milestone and it is really not a good one for him. It's maybe good for people who believe in better governance, but it's not good for Trump. A new poll shows that 40% approve of Trump's job performance and 58% disapprove. That is minus 18. minus 18 for Donald Trump. Among independents, only 27% approved, 63 disapprove. That is a number. This is not theory. Oh, it's a number. What does it mean? This has real consequences. When a president is this deeply unpopular, things break down very quickly. Number one, Congress turns into a

battlefield. Members of the president's own party worry about their seats, especially with the midterms coming up. They distance. They block legislation. They hedge everything. vote. We're starting to see that. We're not going to let Trump take Greenland. We think Trump's going too far here. He's going too far there. Number two, it gets really hard to govern when you are this unpopular because big, forget about big reform. You just can't do it. Budgets get very chaotic. Foreign policy credibility drops. Allies and adversaries see weakness and instability. And then number three, midterms are sort of always a referendum on the party that took power two years before. But it gets extra dicey if the president is this unpopular.

And we've seen this before. Obama was in the low 40s before the 2010 midterms and Democrats lost the house and lost it pretty badly. Biden was in the low 40s before 2022's midterms and Democrats lost the house and barely held the Senate. Bush's approval, George W. Bush's approval collapsed after Iraq and after Katrina. And Republicans got crushed in 2006. Low approval doesn't guarantee a wipeout, but it is definitely a big warning.

And Trump is in the danger zone. The scariest number here is not that Democrats disapprove. We know Democrats disapproved. Democrats don't like Trump. They think he's a disaster. It's the independence. The independence at 27% approval is really a catastrophic number for a party heading into the midterms because independence decides swing districts disproportionately. Why? Independents are the most likely to vote for one party or the other, although it's sort of a myth. Most independents do mostly vote for Republicans or mostly vote for

Democrats. I'm an independent, for example. I vote for very few Republicans. If you look at my voting record, there's been very few Republicans I voted for. But the point here is midterms tend to have lower turnout. And so if you say lower turnout means those who do vote have greater power, Lower turnout also means that those who at least are open to voting for Democrats or Republicans hold disproportionately more sway over the outcome in in those swing districts. And there are close Senate races that that independents could also end up really being a big part of determining which way is this going to go. And remember that Donald Trump is the face of the Republican Party. Every race in 2026 is in a sense nationalized and it is in a

a sense a referendum on Donald Trump. Candidates are going to be asked very similar questions. Do you approve of Donald Trump, whether you're in the Arkansas 5th district or Illinois 8th or wherever, swing districts, lopsided districts? Do you approve of the job that Donald Trump is doing if you're a Republican? And if the answer is, no, I don't approve. Maybe the voters like that, but Trump doesn't. And then Trump goes after you. Anyway, the point here is, polls aren't destiny. Trump has defied polls before sometimes. Partisanship keeps the floor high because so many voters are highly partisan, no matter what Trump does, even as he has said, shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, his level of support won't drop below a certain level. But all of that being said, 58% disapproval is not a vibe problem.

That is a structural problem for Donald Trump. And if these numbers hold, it's not just going to be unpopular Trump going into the midterms. It is going to be unpopular Trump dragging his own party to the meat grinder in the midterms. Now, all of this, you might say, David, you're sounding a little too confident. All of this is only if the left activates, chooses good candidates in the primaries, and gets out to vote. And we know that turnout is often lower in midterms. What we have going for us is that the outprivacy is that the outprivile is that the outprivile is, party, even though turnout is lower in midterms, the out party is usually a little more motivated to

get out and vote. And because Democrats do not control the White House nor the House nor the Senate, it is conceivable that Democrats in left-leaning independence like me will be more eager to vote. And turnout really is potentially the difference maker here. So we are going to follow this very closely. But these numbers so far, a disaster for Donald Trump. The David Packman Show is an audience-supported program and the best, most direct way to support the show is by becoming a member at joinpackman.com. You'll get the daily bonus show, the daily commercial free show, and plenty of other great membership perks.

Get the full experience by signing up at join packman.com. Let's talk about the authoritarian paradox. I want to zoom out here a little bit from the. chaos of the daily news and talk about a pattern and then talk about how significant this is in the world of authoritarianism. What we are watching right now in the Trump administration feels shocking in real time. It feels unprecedented. It feels chaotic.

It feels unique. The ice stuff, the deportations, the incompetence, the threats, the blanket tariffs that make no sense, all of it, stuff, all of it. The adversarial attitude towards a free press. of the above, okay? It all feels unprecedented, chaotic, and unique. And in a sense, it is. But if you look at political history and political science, this is actually the predictable way this was ultimately going to go. And based on that, we can probably predict how it's going to end. Let me explain what I mean. There is something called the authoritarian paradox. You have these strong men figures who run on the

promise that only they can fix the system. And Trump did it not metaphorically. Trump literally said, I'm the, I'm the only one who can fix this stuff. I'm the only one who can fix trade. I'm the only one who can replace Obamacare with a big beautiful replacement and all of this stuff. They are the only ones strong enough. They are the only ones who can effectively cut through the bureaucracy, fire the weaklings and finally come in and impose order. And the exact traits that make some of these people like Trump, popular candidates, are the traits that make them terrible at their jobs. Let me explain what that, what that means. They promise strength, but what they deliver is disorder that has to be managed. Authoritarians sell a brand, and the brand

is, I'm going to dominate. I will be decisive. I will be in control. Democracy is sometimes too slow. I might have to go around it. Institutions can be messy. Experts aren't really experts, or they're too cautious or they move to slowly. So they say the singular will of one authoritarian is much better than this democracy, deliberating, arguing back and forth. And that kind of branding hides two lethal problems that ultimately come back and destroy the authoritarians. Number one is incompetence.

When the primary metric is loyalty, which it is to Trump, it was in the first term, but even more so in the second term, you start purging the people who understand. understand how the system works and you replace them with people who tell you what you want to hear. Sound familiar? You end up with a government staffed by yes men and yes women who have no clue how to run a government. That's problem number one. Problem number two that inevitably comes up is infighting.

In an authoritarian system, everyone knows that power comes from personal favor, not from performance. Am I impressing and pacifying? the dear leader. And the incentive becomes not to make the system work, not to do stuff that's good for the average person. It's we've got to sabotage our rivals. We've got a leak against each other. If it'll allow us to get an add-a-boy from Trump, we need to prove our loyalty in increasingly

extreme ways. That's how you get people like Stephen Miller, who has accomplished nothing, but he's constantly praising Trump. He's still going on Fox News defending every last hairbrain, disgusting, dilapidated and disorienting notion from Donald Trump. And so he gets rewarded by proximity to Trump and he gets to travel on the plane and go with Trump. So if we look at history and there are experts in this, people like Ruth Ben Giyadh and Jason

Stanley and others, you look at historical dictatorships and authoritarian regimes and you see overlapping agencies, competing power centers, paranoid purges, or, you know, and reminds me of Doge, reshuffling constantly of your staff. Oh, Alina Haba's going to be state attorney. Now she's a counselor to the president. Now she's this. Now she's that. And then what ends up happening is the dysfunction grows in the system because a functioning system would limit the personal control of the dear leader. And the dysfunction ends up eating the regime from the inside. You start getting institutional decay. We've got it. Look at DOJ. Look at the FBI under Cash Patel. Look at health and human services under Bobby.

Look at the wrestling lady controlling the department of education. So the professionals leave. The institutions decay under the leadership of clowns. Actual experts say there's really no room for me here. I guess I'm going to quit or sometimes they get fired. And so you end up not even with a B team. You end up with like the people that dropped out already years ago or something like that. The cronies, the ideologues, the people who could not get.

hired in anything like these positions anywhere else. That then leads, and this is what's starting, to the circular firing squad. Everybody's leaking, everybody's backstabbing, maneuvering, not because they care about, we got to get the right policy and let me figure out how to do it. They're doing all of it because their own survival depends on being seen as the most loyal. I am the most loyal to Donald Trump. And that's the feedback loop that will destroy reality. In authoritarian systems, becomes disloyalty. You told the truth. You mean you weren't loyal to me. If a staffer says this is an illegal policy, sir, this is unconstitutional, this will fail. Oh, you're part of the deep state. What are you part of the conspiracy that's trying to bring me down? And so they get removed.

And what's left is a vacuum. The talent is let is gone. Honest information is gone. Law and order is gone. The strong man doesn't get stronger over the long term. The strong man gets isolated and the strong man gets misinformed even by the people around him and is increasingly detached from reality. This is what is happening to Trump. Everything around him gets disrupted, including his own ability to govern. So when you see the Trump administration struggling to do basic things and you see the chaos and the infighting and the leaks and the policy and coherence, it's the inevitable conclusion of authoritarianism. Authoritarian leadership always looks like this once the governing starts because they don't know how to govern. They promise iron-fisted control,

and they deliver authoritarianism with a completely dysfunctional framework and scaffolding. And then income, the sycophants and the rivals, and they promise order, but all you get is disorder. We've seen this movie end before around the world. The hope is that it ends with Trump likewise, but not with unnecessary death and suffering, which by the way, we're also, already seeing too much of today. You know, there's a basic mistake that people make when they analyze the current administration. They listen to what Trump and allies say and they assume that it reflects what those people actually believe. And it doesn't. If they actually believe their own rhetoric, they would act very differently. And the gap between what they say and how they act, between the

words and the behavior, that's where I believe the real story is. I'm going to give you an interesting example, which is the cancel culture stuff. For years, MAGA said cancel culture was an existential threat to free speech. Trump's 2025 inaugural address promised that the power of the state would never again be weaponized against our political opponents. And then what happened? Within months, the administration launched a so-called cultural crackdown. They went after law firms like Perkins Coy. They pushed federal oversight of university curricula. They started threatening institutions that weren't aligned politically. They are doing the very thing they said they are against. So the rhetoric was never about principle. It was about who has the power. Cancel culture is bad really means cancel culture

is bad when it's used against us. But if we use it against other people, it's not a problem. This is why I have an entire chapter in my book, The Echo Machine, about how our principles are important understanding that the framework of our values matters. Why do we believe the things we believe? But getting involved in these philosophical black holes about principles with the right is pointless because their principles are only their principles for as long as it's politically convenient. And the rhetoric never really was about principle. I'll give you another example, immigration and border security. We've got the show your papers executive order in 2025, sold to us as a national emergency, sold to us as essential to sovereignty and election integrity

and the ice deployments and the entire thing. If they actually believe there was a real emergency, they'd be doing the difficult work, which is we need legislation and coalitions and detailed policy to fix this problem once and for all. They have the White House, they have the Senate, and they have the House. Democrats and some Republicans have put out, I mean, think back to John McCain. have put out comprehensive immigration reform bills. Deporting a bunch of people unless you fix the problems isn't going to fix anything,

but they're not doing it. Do they really believe it's an emergency or are they trying to get the media moment they want from the absolutely immoral deportation raids and killing of people by ICE agents and all of it? Instead, all they do is that plus some sloppy executive orders, a bunch that have been challenged in block. They get headlines. I guess they rally the base.

I don't know, but structurally, it does nothing. It's only theater. We then get to foreign policy. Greenland, Iran, China. The rhetoric is always fire and fury. We're going to put maximum pressure, might makes right, peace through strength. And then you watch their behavior and it's actually retreat very often. At Davos, Trump walked back threats on Iran.

He says he pulled back because they wanted to talk. On Greenland, it was these bombastic threats. We must have it. and we will take it followed by, oh, we don't really need to do anything because we've got a deal. Oh, does the deal include that the U.S. gets Greenland? Well, no, it doesn't. So he wants the image of the tough guy without the cost of being the tough guy. So I believe that this is a simple behavioral loop.

Trump's primary goal is immediate emotional payoff. He wants applause. He wants viral clips. He wants headlines that make him look big and strong. That pushes rhetoric towards the extreme. You get more attention with extremist rhetoric. But there's also this transactional risk-averse component to Donald Trump. He doesn't want wars that could fail.

He doesn't want policies that could crash markets. And remember what happened when he was getting closer on the tariff Norway because he did, they didn't give him the Nobel Prize and then tariff Denmark because Norway didn't give him the Nobel Prize and whatever it was, Greenland, something or other. It started crashing the markets. And within 24 hours, Trump back. off because he doesn't actually want the real sacrifice that it might take to do the things he claims he wants to do.

So the action lags the rhetoric always. And sometimes we never get the action. This creates a credibility paradox. Even his own allies stop taking his rhetoric seriously, which is dangerous. I'm going to get back to that. But even his own allies just go, ah, you know, Elon or J.D. Vans, whatever. They don't listen to his speeches. It doesn't matter what he says.

It's just what's going on behind the. scenes. They realize that the rhetoric is a lot of the content and then the governing is a completely different mess. It's still a mess. It's not the rhetoric is crazy, but this is a completely sensible administration on policy. It's the rhetoric is crazy. And also he starts to back off as soon as he gets difficult and then he does other things that don't make sense and we lose allies and we lose trade deals and we lose all of it. So this is not about a single policy. This is how leader, like Trump behave. They make very loud promises, some symbolic actions. They retreat when it gets difficult. And then ultimately, they end up creating a huge mess without actually fixing any of the

problems they want to fix. Perfect example is the tariff stuff. He wrongly told us the tariffs would make us rich and make us strong and bring supply chains back home and lower prices and none of that happened. We still have the tariffs. But what we have are other countries that are saying, we don't really need or want to be in an alliance with the United States. If we're China, we'll go somewhere else for our soybeans. If we're whoever, we'll go somewhere else for whatever it is that we're talking about. And so I think it's important on the one hand to take seriously the rhetoric when the Republicans go, oh, it's Trump being Trump.

That's just bluster. He doesn't really plan to do any of this stuff. No, he does. We should listen when he does the bluster because it's not bluster. It's what he plans to do. But what we should understand is that the way in which it will damage the country is not the obvious one because it will be Trump going halfway, getting panicked, and then doing something else that makes no sense whatsoever.

You've got the hands and mouth doing two different things. They're both doing terrible things. They just happen not to be the exact same things. Thank you all for watching. This show was recorded in advance because I am away. but I will be talking about Don Lemon's heinous arrest tomorrow.