The David Pakman Show - MAGA voters are snapping out of it, but what comes next is ugly

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

Watch on Spotify. Spotify Premium users get no commercial breaks on my show: https://open.spotify.com/show/1T2BWou29M0aNfhFx61mL6 -- On the Show: -- Donald Trump returns from China without a breakthrough on Iran or oil prices, then threatens more military escalation as gas prices remain high -- Decades of institutional failures, economic instability, and collapsing public trust are fueling conspiracy thinking and deepening political division -- New polling shows Donald Trump losing major support among Latino voters as rising costs and unmet economic promises weaken his coalition -- Donald Trump delivers an awkward prerecorded message for the Rededicate 250 religious event that mixes government with religion -- Former Trump supporters publicly describe regretting their votes as frustration grows over broken promises and a worsening economy -- A fiery Fox News segment from Maria Bartiromo defends Trump with misleading claims about Russia, Joe Biden, and federal investigations -- Polling reveals a major disconnect between Republican perceptions about immigration and tariffs versus the economic and crime data -- David discovers thousands of messages from angry people who kept calling years after the show stopped taking voicemails -- On the Bonus Show: Trump drops his $10 billion IRS lawsuit, Trump's revenge tour in Republican primaries continues, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert enters its final week, and much more... 💦 Pocket Hose: Text PAKMAN to 64000 for two free gifts with purchase of Pocket Hose Ballistic 🛌 Helix Sleep mattresses: Get 27% OFF sitewide at https://helixsleep.com/pakman 🛡️ Incogni lets you control your personal data! Get 60% off their annual plan: http://incogni.com/pakman 🔬 Freedom From Religion Foundation: Text DAVID to 511511 or go to https://ffrf.us/david -- 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 (01:19) Trump got nothing from his China trip (09:32) Trump's poor economy amplifies conspiracy theories (20:37) Trump's support among Latino men collapses (31:23) Trump delivers awkward remarks at Rededicate 250 (41:21) Former Trump supporters speak out (49:33) Maria Bartiromo tries to distract from Trump's failures (56:57) Polling shows Republicans are wrong on immigration (1:04:12) David checks the voicemail line Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trump flew to China trying to fix the Iran disaster and came back with absolutely nothing. Oil is exploding. Gas prices are crushing Americans. Trump is threatening even more war, even though he said he would be the anti-war president. And meanwhile, major polling collapses are happening with Latino voters, even among the very Latino men who helped Donald Trump become president in 2024. They are bailing. We're going to look at why and why it is surprising analysts. and then rededicate 250, a completely ridiculous unconstitutional event held to rededicate the United States on its 250th birthday to being a formally religious Christian country. What on earth are they doing? But there are more and more Trump voters regretting everything and we're hearing from them.

Plus wait till I tell you about my. MAGA stalker. Yes, leaving me angry voicemails for years without realizing no one was listening. We found out because of an accident. It is an insane story. All of it today. You know, I've sometimes used the phrase on the show. He pooped in the sandbox and then went home and left everybody else to clean up his mess. And this is a very apt analogy for what happened with Donald Trump's disastrous China trip last week. The most embarrassing president, pressing presidential trip overseas that I remember in the entire time that I've been covering American politics.

The trip failed to achieve any of its goals. The trip exposed Donald Trump as a lover of dictators as a suck up to dictators. And then it left them coming home with nothing but ready to do even more war, even though we were told that this is the anti-war president. It's the opposite of everything that we were promised. It's the opposite of everything that we should want as Americans. So there were a few goals of this trip. Number one, Donald Trump flew to China to try to make some kind of a deal with President Xi,

whether it's on tariffs, whether it's on what's going to happen with Taiwan, maybe with relation to China's involvement in Iran. But the idea was let's get something. Let's project strength and make deals and get commitments. And Donald Trump embarrassed himself. He talked about Chinese food. was totally emasculated by Xi from everything to, on everything from, I should better say, foreign policy to domestic policy, to even the handshake games that she was having none of.

She outgamed Trump. And I say this from an objective standpoint that doesn't make me happy. I don't like dictators. I like democracy. I prefer our system of government to China's, but I've got to hand it to Xi. Trump was completely outgunned here. Now, we think about what's happening with Iran. The war started on February 28th.

It was going to be a three-week war. We are now entering week 12, I think. I'd have to pull up a calendar to say exactly, but I believe we're now entering week 12. Trump has ended this war seven times per his social media posts. But we are continuing to see strikes. And we are continuing to see a strait of Hormuz that. It's certainly not open. I guess we can't say it's completely closed, but it's certainly not open even though Donald

Trump told us we've opened it and then they closed it and we closed it on top of that. But then it was back open and they said they would open it, but they didn't. So we did. And then it's closed. Inconceivably incoherent nonsense. But there's a factual reality, which is truth social posts aside, 20% of the world's oil goes through that straight. And so like it or not and no matter how much oil we're getting from Texas as,

Donald Trump said, this is arguably the biggest and longest supply disruption in history. And it was optional. This didn't happen because of meteor hit. This didn't happen because of some war that Trump had nothing to do with in the United States. It's just sort of reacting to this. This was Trump's choice to do it. So he said it's going to take three to four weeks. Okay.

It's going to be four to six weeks. We're now in entering or almost beyond week 12. We had a ceasefire who even what's a few ceasefires between friends? I guess on April 8th we had a ceasefire and the condition was that the Strait of Hormuz must be reopened by Iran. And they didn't. And then we had another ceasefire, I guess, or maybe it was part of the same one or it was restarted or the name of it was changed, but it was the same one. And then Donald Trump was asked last. week the day after that new ceasefire. What is the status? And Trump goes, this is the weakest ceasefire ever. It's it's on massive life support. So he flies to China and gets she to, I guess,

try to save him diplomatically. And Trump says she is on board. She says the straight must reopen and she wants to help. And China. We know, we'll buy American oil. It's all awesome. It's all great. And in reality, none of that had anything to do with Donald Trump. That's all stuff that China said before Trump's plane even landed. And this is a theme of Trump.

Think back to the first of two failed North Korean summits where Trump went in to, quote, negotiate with Kim Jong-un, not understanding the long history of North Korean promises to the United States. And they're always the same in Kim Jong-un. Zhangun made them as well. Kim Jong-un said we would consider denuclearizing and we would look at no longer doing missile testing and we all these different. And Trump thinks I got all of these commitments from North Korea, not understanding the history

of it, which is that North Korean leaders have made those promises to American presidents before. They're not unique to Trump. They weren't because of Trump's great strength. And maybe most importantly, North Korea never sticks to those. promises. So then Trump thinks he's gotten a victory, but he really hasn't. Okay. We then get to Taiwan during the China trip. And she warned Trump about Taiwan. The idea was big boy Trump is so big and so strong and he's going to go and project strength. But it was she who said, we, he

parsed his words, but communicated, we will go to war with the United States over the issue of Taiwan. Trump comes home and goes, this guy is one of the best leaders. We love him. He's my friend. And he's just so incredible. He rules with an iron fist in a good way over 1.4 billion people. And meanwhile, the Taiwan situation is arguably more perilous. Iran is in week 12 of disaster. Oil is at, I mean, just to be accurate, um, let me see where exactly we're at right now. Oil is again over $100 a barrel. Gas prices. are still crushing Americans. And as I've said before, even if the straight were to open today, normalization takes probably

into 2027 on this. The economic approval of Trump is at 30%. It's the lowest of either term. And Donald Trump is posting to be continued on truth social about the campaign against Iran. So we have a situation that if you only want to talk about the PR act. of course it's embarrassing. Of course, Trump got nothing and it's just an endless disaster. But it's also from a practical standpoint, a real problem for Americans just wanting to go about their lives and they're dealing with prices that are high, a president that's unstable,

global scenarios that are increasingly perilous for the United States of America. And we now have news from over the weekend that the United States and Israel, are actively preparing new strikes with regard to Iran, possibly as soon as this week. Maybe it would be bombing Iran's main oil export hub that would make gas prices go up even more. And so where we are increasingly pointing is to try to solve a war that tanked the economy with more war and potentially more tanking of the economy. He would end all of the wars, he said, before. I even take office and he's escalating a supposedly three week war at week 12. And the gas prices

are not getting any better. So this is going to be something that Americans have to contend with through the election. And when people go out there to vote, they will have to evaluate. Well, how do I vote on the basis of what has happened? What have I been promised and what have I gotten. And this is why I believe what comes next is not going to be good. And I think we need to address that next. We are not really in a political crisis right now in the same sense that we usually say political crisis. We are in more of a trust crisis. And I want to explain what I mean by that and point us to whatever comes next here in the United States in terms of the political system is almost certainly going to be very, very ugly. We are sort of sleepwalking into a.

a disaster that I'm going to delineate and explain for you. On the one hand, we have to acknowledge that a lot of our major institutions have failed very visibly over the last couple of decades. Now, I know many of you are going to say, David, I thought you were a defender of institutions. I am a defender of institutions. We need institutions to run a society the size of the United States. But I want to acknowledge that in different ways, institutions have failed very visibly in the United States for a long time. We've seen the failure of the church in different ways with various scandals and pointing American society in the wrong direction in a lot of instances. We've seen failures of the banking system, go back to the 2008 financial crisis. We've seen

failures of the intelligence agencies. Now, not in the way Donald Trump wants you to believe, But we have seen intelligence failures in the United States. We're regularly failed by legacy and corporate media. The medical health insurance industrial establishment has failed Americans in many ways. Obviously, our government has failed the people of the United States in many ways over the last 20 years. Now, it hasn't happened all at once. It hasn't been in the exact way that the right claims it to be, but we have done a lot of damage to the idea that the people in charge know what they are doing or that they are necessarily on our side. Okay. So that is true. And the devil is in the

details. The Iraq war was sold on lies. The 2008 crash was caused by the very people who were supposed to prevent it. We've seen the Catholic church cover abuse for decades. We've seen the opioid crisis which was to a great degree fomented and made worse by a combination of the medical system, pharmaceutical companies and the regulatory agencies that are supposed to prevent it. COVID was handled disastrously by the Trump administration during his first term, all of this stuff. And so now we have a lot of conspiracy theorists in the United States. And I don't think that the conspiracy theory industrial complex is because people are necessarily

stupid, I think that there is a degree to which when so much stuff is going wrong, it feels better to a lot of people to believe that everything is some massive plan. Unpredictable bad things don't really happen. It's all planned and staged and whatever. And this is the problem when you do see failures institutionally, which is that this vacuum opens up. And what fills it is this wacky, conspiracy culture that we now have and a complete distrust that institutions even could do good things. And a lot of that is what is fueled Trumpism. And so you've now got this conspiracy ecosystem that is self-financing. It's algorithmically supercharged by digital platforms. It's immune to correction. And they don't need to be right. They just need to be engaging. And I've been researching and writing a lot

about this for my forthcoming book, pay attention, which is now available for pre-order. You've got four 40% of Americans that just don't pay attention to the news at all. It's not necessarily that they don't care, but they just don't necessarily believe a lot of it and don't understand if and how it connects to their daily lives. So they're like, I'm completely checked out. You've got 70% globally who say, I don't trust people who get their news from different sources than I do. So the shared common reality is gone. I wrote about that in my first book, the echo machine. And then you've got an economic dimension to this that doesn't really get reported very much. Stanford researchers call it a credibility recession, which is that the distrust has economic consequences. When people don't

trust stock markets and the financial system, and you see a distrust of borrowing from institutions, people retreat from investing or engaging with the financial system, which could be a good thing or could be a bad thing, but by the metrics we use to measure an economy, it hurts the economy. So if you take a story like, for example, Trump attacking the Fed and Jerome Powell, there's a political angle to it, of course, but there's also an economic aspect to it, which is the dollar for now is the global reserve currency because markets trust the Fed over our politics. But if and when Trump manages to turn the Fed totally political and how he's getting his replacement to Jerome Powell sworn in and all of this stuff, you see $105 oil, inflation, declining

job creation, tariffs that are totally destroying supply chains. And so these stories end up having a real economic impact on the United States. The right has weaponized this. The right has built a machine that uses that loop of conspiracy and distrust of institutions and all of it. They use it as a fundraising and turnout tool. They raise money on that. And they've radicalized their own voters beyond the point of even being governable.

Now, meanwhile, it's not like everything's perfect on the left. And this is why I believe what comes next is going to be very ugly. The left is also very fractured. of the left says we've got to go way, way, way far left, up to and including becoming a socialist country, for example, primary anyone who compromises on anything, even if we lose everything, we're going to do it because it's the right thing to do. And meanwhile, the centrist Democrats and the establishment Democrats couldn't be less inspiring, couldn't be more milk toast.

And quite frankly, if I'm honest, I don't think the far left or the establishment left really have a vision that says to me that's the direction we should go. I am not a socialist. I don't believe we should go in the direction of socialism. And also the pathetic mealy mouth tiny little changes that much of the establishment Democratic Party wants to make aren't going to be enough to really fix the problems that we have. So we've got problems on the right of one kind. We've got a left that I just don't know if is really positioned to take power and use power

and lead. And so we are going towards as we now start to think about what happens after Donald Trump, for example, what happens to the Republican Party, what happens in the midterms, the discussions around Gavin Newsom and AOC in 2028. I think that there is unfortunately a very real possibility that the political situation gets really ugly before it gets better. And unfortunately, that the economic situation also does. I want to hear from you and let me mention, by the way, that you can watch the entire podcast on Spotify. And if you subscribe to Spotify premium, you get no Spotify ads on the video podcast. We're going to take a very

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of the subjects we talk about on the podcast, you can find that free at David Pakman.com slash substack. The bottom has dropped out for Donald Trump. Analysts are shocked at the numbers. And Trump has dramatically lost a group of voters that got him elected. This you have to see. Remember that after the 24 election, we had a remarkable situation, which was that Latino voters voted for Trump to a degree we have not seen for a Republican candidate ever. And there was a question, is the Latino population moving towards the Republican Party for good? Are they now Republicans? And I have some thoughts on that, but we have some new data. Harry Enton actually tweeted about that. this. He said, quote, the bottom has completely fallen out for Trump with Latino voters. After

winning a record share for a GOP nominee in 2024, just 28% of Latinos approve of Trump now. The drop with Latino men is even more dramatic. He won him by 10 in 2024. His net approval is now minus 41 points. Let's listen to this report. Here, where are we now? What a different world. I'm the president of the United States, because just take a look here. Okay, Latino voters on Trump. He won a record share for a Republican presidential nominee, 46% of that vote, going all the way back since we had the advent of exit polls back in 1972.

And look at where he is today. His job approval rating in an average of CNN polls this year, 28%. That is an 18-point drop. The bottom has completely fallen out when it comes to Donald Trump and Latino voters. He won record numbers of him back in 2024, and they have abandoned him with the utmost just dislike of what he is doing so far, just 28%, a drop of 18 points. Now, among Latinos, it was Latino men

who were driving this movement toward him in 2024. Where are they now? Yeah, you think that this movement is a lot. What about Latino men? Oh my goodness gracious. Okay, Latino male voters. In the 2024 election versus Kamala Harris, look at this, Trump won him by 10 points.

Look at the net approval rating now. Minus 41 points. That is a movement of 51 points, a shift away from the President of United States. Latino male voters supercharged that record performance that Donald Trump had with Latino voters. And they, like Latino women, Latinos are moving against the President of the United States. All right, you get the point. Latino men, Latino women, everybody's moving against Trump after record numbers with Latino voters, especially Latino men in 2024. for. There were a lot of pundits in 2024 who were convinced this is permanent and this is an ideological

conversion. Latino men in particular have become more right wing and now they are voting for Republicans. That was never true. And I suspected this at the time because of the conversations I was having with Latino voters. As many of you know, I'm a Hispanic immigrant from Argentina to the United States. I'm constantly in touch with voters. Many voters who vote and primarily are engaging with Spanish language content, interestingly enough, rather than English language content. And it seemed extraordinarily narrow and personal, personality driven rather than ideologically driven. In legacy and corporate media, you often hear them talk about Latino voters as if they have shifted ideologically and are a single unified block.

The reality seems to be that there was a group of Latino voters, particularly Latino men, who did not feel that the four years of Biden were particularly good for them. And they decided this time around we're going to take a chance on something different than what we normally choose and that is Donald Trump. And now they've looked. and they've evaluated the outcomes. And they've seen, okay, here's his promises on gas prices, what actually happened with gas prices. Here were his promises on food prices.

What's actually going on with food prices? They are sky high. What about job creation? Job creation is down. What about the promises to get housing costs under control and get rent down? That didn't happen. Housing costs and rent are up. Those realities hit everybody.

The reason that you're seeing such a backlash with Latino voters and Latino men in general was they had moved out of equilibrium. towards Trump. It was an anomaly, even an anomaly. By the way, both pronunciations totally perfect and accepted. It was an unusual thing that happened. And so when you have a regression to the mean after these Latino voters go, okay, we tried that. It didn't work. The promises were not kept to. He failed us on all of the things that he told us he was going to do. Now you're seeing a regression to the mean and beyond because every group is saying, I don't really think Trump's doing a particularly good job. And that's how you end up with minus 41 Latino

male voters on Trump relative to how they voted in 2024. Now let's get back to this whole like unified block thing. If I said to you something like Americans don't like Trump, we all would intuitively say, okay, but what does that really mean? We've got a very regional country. The northeast and the west coast really don't like Trump. The deep south likes Trump a lot more. Or we might say, hey, you know what, women like Trump significantly less than men in the United States. Or we might say white men in the United States do support Trump to a greater degree. We intuitively know that when we say Americans believe X or Y, that that encompasses a lot

of different types of people in a geographically very large country. It's the same way with Latino voters. Now, there have been some shifts. Historically, the Latino vote was very left wing. with two exceptions, Cuban Americans and Venezuelan Americans. Why? This is sort of an oversimplification, but the idea is that those Cuban Americans and Venezuelan Americans, many of whom escaped regimes in Cuba and Venezuela, strong men authoritarian regimes that postulated as being on the left, authoritarianism is authoritarianism at the end of the day. They saw or see the Republican Party

as stronger rejectors of what they fled in Cuba and Venezuela. So historically, that is why Cuban and Venezuelan Americans have tended to be more right-wing. All other Latino voters tended to be quite left-wing. We saw a little bit of that change in 2024, where you saw more Mexicans and Salvadorans and Argentinians. And these are relatively smaller groups in the United States, of course, say maybe some of them saying maybe I'll take a chance with Trump. Now, not a lot of them. Trump didn't win with them, but he had more share of that. And that's all reversing.

And interestingly, I was just in Argentina, spoke to a lot of family and friends there, have recently met a group of Salvadorans and spoke to them about in the United States, their views on Trump. And it all is much more sour on Trump now. In fact, I remember having an Uber driver from El Salvador in Vegas during. during the run up to the 2024 election. And he was into Trump. And he said, no, I like what Trump is offering. I'm sick of these Democrats and all this stuff. So we're seeing a reversal in general, but it's important to remember that these are also discrete groups. Now, Trump has a movement that screws so many people that it's the type of movement that needs

to expand who they can market their grievances to because you make promises to one group and you fail on those promises. So you start to hemorrhage that group. You've got to find someone new. And Trump came up with enough grievance scapegoating during 2024 that it convinced a portion of Latino Americans to vote for him. Now, what I think is really, really funny, kind of ironic, is that Republicans have spent over a decade claiming that the Democrats are the party of identity politics.

But they are the ones now kind of panicking over this. demographic erosion. They look at the gender splits. They look at the racial splits. They look at the educational splits. They look all of the and they are seeing the problems. And now they are doing a lot of the very identity politics stuff that they criticize the left for doing for for about a decade. So I am reassured by this reversal that we are seeing to a degree. But there's also a lesson for Democrats in this thing, which is you can't see. simply wait for Trump to fail. If voters come back after the, if Latino voters come back to Democrats, but still feel economically abandoned, which is what got them to say, let's try

Trump to begin with. They are going to just repeat the cycle again. And then it'll be 2028 or whenever and they'll go, maybe we try JD vans. I don't know. I don't feel like the Democratic Party is necessarily giving me what I want. So there's a broader story here. That story is, Modern political loyalty isn't nearly as strong as some people might think. It is very unstable. Voters are more movable the more economic anxiety there is. That's what, you know, men and women's sports, as I've said many times, is not likely to make people switch or consider switching party lines to a significant degree.

But if you feel that one party is either screwing you economically or doesn't care about you economically. That is going to make you curious about trying the other party. Trump's coalition was always a contradictory coalition, you know, anti-war voters who vote for a guy that clearly supports escalations and then he does the escalations. And then they're like, well, this escalation, I guess it's good or working class voters saying, I want Trump's tariffs, even though they're going to screw my small business and make everything more expensive. We've always had those contradictions. The Latino voters said, let's try it. And then it failed miserably.

And now they are very quickly coming back. The question is, can Democrats actually keep them now? There is nothing more important than rededicating ourselves to prayer and Jesus right now. Have I just had a stroke? No. But this is what the administration is doing. Foreign policy is a mess. Gas prices are up.

Jobs are down. Food prices are up. Trump went to China, embarrassed himself, came back with nothing. So let's do an event about Jesus. They call it rededicate 250. The United States of America is turning 250 years old. They said, let's do a full day of prayer and praise. Can you think of anything more exciting and titillating?

They did it on the national mall in D.C. It was organized by a nonprofit group. And the big thing was Trump will speak. Trump is going to rededicate the country to God. Is that constitutional? Probably not. Is it what the country was founded upon? Definitely not.

Donald Trump was going to be speaking. And it was a short pre-recorded message. And Trump could barely get the words out. Trump's teeth and tongue embroiled in a battle. to destroy his speaking ability, you'll notice also that when Trump is speaking, he covers his mangled right hand with the left for much of the video. This is now something Trump does deliberately. He covers the insane bruising of unknown origin. Deliberately, you'll see that Trump is really struggling to speak. This was going to be a speech from Trump. It was a pre-recorded message with mangled

diction and Trump barely able to put a couple words together. The Solomon finished the house of the Lord and the Solomon finished the house of the Lord. King's house and all that came into Solomon's heart to make in the house of the Lord. And in his own house, he prosperously affected. And the Lord appeared to Solomon by night and said to him, I have heard your prayer and have chosen this place to myself. for a house of sacrifice.

You can tell Trump really identifies with the substance of this. He's deeply spiritual. If I shut up heaven, that there be no rain, or if I command the locust to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people, if my people which are called by- Notice by the way the cuts that are necessary because Trump simply cannot do this in a single take. And my name shall humble themselves and pray. and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. Now my eyes shall be open and my ears attend to the prayer that is

made in this place. Now I want to remind you, we have not added those, those strained in-breaths. When Trump goes, we will rededicate our shelves to Shaliman, the, Those in breaths are naturally occurring. For now, I have chosen and sanctified this house that my name may be there forever. And my eyes and my heart shall be there perpetually. And as for you, if you will walk before me, as David, your father walked. Your father. And do according to all that I have committed.

Walk before your father, please. Ended you and shall observe my statutes and my judgments. Then will I establish the throne of my kingdom according to as I have covenanted with David your father saying there shall. David, your father's here. This he can barely put these sentences together. This was bill. This Trump's going to be giving a speech. Well, he's going to record a message.

Well, it's going to be two minutes long. And by the way, it'll be. be done with a hundred takes strapped together. A lot of people also noticing the message ending very, very abruptly. He answered because they forsook the Lord God of their fathers, which brought them forth out of the land of Egypt and laid hold on other gods and worship them and serve them. Therefore, has he brought all this evil upon them? Right. Oh, and it's over. What? Imagine going to this event standing out there with the feted sannie cans and the fried dough for 12 or of 18 bucks.

And then it's going to be a Trump speech. And then Trump shows up covering his mangled hand in a pre-recorded video where the angle cut every time Trump screws up and they have to start over, the angle cuts to a side shot. And that's the big Trump speech to rededicate the United States on a time. It's 250th anniversary. Forget about the fact that this is completely unconstitutional and indicative of a utter disrespect for separation of church and state. Like put that aside for a second.

This is your great spiritual leader who I want to remind you completely concocted this religious identity. And one of the, you know, we talk about a lot of the ways in which Trump is sort of like a cult leader. And one of the ways is he tricked people into believing he even believes this crap. What I mean by that is, Trump's not a religious guy. Trump grew up not religious. And suddenly at six, 68 years of age, he's going to run for president as a Republican. He says the Bible is the most important book, even though he can't tell us any passages that are meaningful to him. Are you an Old Testament guy or a New Testament guy? He was famously asked. I would say,

both, both. Can you give us some of your favorite perverses? No, it's just, it's so personal. to me that I don't want to do that. Trump was pro-choice his entire life. And at 68 years of age, he goes, hey, you know what? I think abortion's bad. Why, sir? What happened? Oh, I met a kid I liked.

And the mom said, I once thought about getting an abortion, but I didn't. Cool. So Trump's pro-life now. We have to not only look at the game of the cult leader who is doing the scamming, but we also do have to acknowledge that there is a population here very willing to be conned and to join Colt. Bonus moment from this deranged event. Here is Senator Tim Scott. Do you love Jesus? And he didn't quite get the reaction he wanted. So he had to dump that a second time. How many of you love Jesus? I can't hear you. I said, how many do you love Jesus?

Ladies and gentlemen. Exactly. Shouldn't you know how Trump loves to say about COVID should never have happened. This event should never have happened. Scams and identity theft rarely start with a hacked password. They usually start when your personal information is easy to find online. Your address, phone number, relatives, employment history. That information lives on countless data broker sites on the internet, accessible to almost anyone unless you actively remove it.

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even a single exposed profile can lead to fraud, harassment, identity theft. Incogni's removal process is independently verified by Deloitte, and you can get 60% off when you go to incogni.com slash Pacman and use the code Pacman. You know, the United States started as a rebellion against a monarch who claimed divine authority, and the founders followed that by creating our secular constitution, no reference to a deity, no religious tests, clear separation between church and state. That was on purpose. It was designed to protect pluralism and individual conscience and religious freedom for everybody. But today, we're seeing increasing efforts to challenge that. Donald Trump's America praise event

on May 17th, which aligns government with Christianity. That raises major constitutional concerns. Our sponsor, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, works to protect separation of church and state because it protects you and it protects me. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the United States, the question isn't just what we celebrate. It's what do we defend. Visit ffrf.us slash David or text my name, David, to 511, 511. To learn more or to join because protect. Protecting that separation protects our rights.

The info is in the description. Text fees may apply. More and more Trump voters are leaving the cult. They are waking up. This is a political awakening I can get behind. You know, 45 year olds who suddenly do a 180 and go, I think I'm a right wing lunatic now. I struggle to respect that. People who after being in a cult for 10 years who can say,

you know what I was tricked I fell for it I wanted to believe I was bamboozled but I regret it and I'm sorry and I apologize that I can respect you know how um anti-vaxers love to say oh I know so many people who regret getting the vaccine usually they mean the COVID vaccine but it could be any vaccine I meet people all the time who go you know I really regret having gotten that vaccine And then we can't find almost anyone who regrets it. Well, we have more and more Trump voters who do regret voting for Donald Trump and they're going public. We had an example last week of someone who called into C-SPAN and explained this.

And we have another, listen, if this is honest, this is a genuine apology. This is a real maya culpa, three-time Trump voter from Hawaii who says he should have known better, who says it should have been clear that Trump. Trump is a con man and a liar and doesn't keep promises. This is a sign that the people are starting to consider leaving the cult. I'm going to explain to you in a moment what this means and what it doesn't mean and why this actually tends to happen in cults. Hard for me to say this, but I think if I can open up about it in public that it might

help others. I wanted to believe Trump was a real deal for a long time. I had doubts because I knew enough about his business history to think otherwise. But now I regret my support for him, and I should have known better. He's making it plain as day. He's a con man. A liar doesn't keep his promises. He's in office all for himself, and he doesn't even try to hide his corruption anymore.

So unless you get all your information from what I call the right-wing, propaganda for profit, disinformation, media, industrial complex. He's the worst president we've ever had, and he's the most corrupt president we've ever had. I know it's hard. It took me a while to be able to say that. Very difficult when you commit yourself to believing in somebody. Thomas, if you don't mind me interjecting,

did you vote for Trump all three times in 2016, 2020, 2020, 24? I'm sorry, I missed that. Say that again, please. Did you vote for President Trump all three times that he's run? Yes. I wanted to vote. I considered a third party. And I considered even the Democrat, but I did in the end vote for him.

And what do you feel, that's really interesting. What do you feel, or what was the straw that broke the camel's back this time around? Was it the war? I don't think it's one thing. It's been a cumulative process. And it's gotten so blatant now. And he's just literally the things he's, you know, he's going to lower prices on day one. He was going to do this.

This is a three-time Trump voter folks. This on day one. Only he could fix all this stuff. And now I understand how somebody like Adolf Hitler was able to brainwash millions of people. I never thought I'd see that again in my lifetime. But it's happened, right? I thought we got past that. but we don't learn from history.

But I just hope the best we got to slow him down, make him accountable anywhere we can. Right now, the only weapon is to vote for as many Democrats, whether you like them or not. So listen, this is a remarkable piece of video. I want to explain kind of what's happening here. The cult is starting to die around Donald Trump. And there are, we have to think about this in terms of cult dynamics. That's what it is. It's a cult at the end of the day.

It's a political cult. We've spoken to cult experts about this. A lot of times when the leader is dying. Now, I'm using dying euphemistically here. Trump may be dying. Like I know we talk about Trump's health a lot. But what I mean here is everything that Trump promised has failed to materialize. His presidency is dying.

And he's about to be the lamest of lame ducks. Now, he may also have some disease they're not telling us about, but that's a different story. But we are clearly moving towards the death of the leader politically. Sometimes people want to get out before the leader dies. This has happened in cults. And in this case, it's not the physical death of the leader, but it's the death of his prophecy or of his power.

He is not going to be delivering on any of his promises. I previously interviewed, this was years ago, one of the followers of this guy, Harold Camping, who I don't even remember the date. I think it was like, oh, April 21st of 2012 or something like that. Let's actually look it up and see if my memory serves me. Harold camping. May 21st, 2011. I almost had it right.

May 21st of 2011. All right. On May 21st of 2011, it was going to be the rapture. And most people would die, but its followers would be saved and a spaceship would come down and they would go up or some crap. Okay. A few days before that. couple weeks. I interviewed one of his followers. And I said, so what if it doesn't happen? Like, what, what happens? And she said, well, I don't know that I'm really going to be up for talking much if it

doesn't happen. I said, why? And she'll go, well, it'll, it'll probably mean I'll have been one of the people who was raptured and didn't get chosen. I go, no, no, no, but like, imagine that just nothing happened. And she didn't even want to address that. Of course, the date came and went and we tried to get a hold of her. And she had just disappeared, just didn't want anything to do with the whole thing anymore. And it is not uncommon that when there is this irreversible failure to deliver, people start to bail. And a lot of times these cults or these political movements can look really strong and solid until people feel socially safe saying, this is nuts. I'm wrong. I'm leaving.

I'm going in a different direction. People need to feel safe in order to do that. Trump's movement, Trump's cult, depends a lot on emotional loyalty. But you look around and you see the prices are up, war, chaos. How can I maintain my loyalty in this environment? And so when a former supporter goes, I did it three times, but I was fooled. That is very powerful, very powerful. And one of the things that is really important to understand.

And we kind of intuitively knew this, but I think it's becoming more clear now. A lot of the Trump voters were not and are not hardcore ideologues. They were really frustrated with what they saw as the status quo that failed them. Okay. So they tried something new. They were distrustful of institutions for reasons that may or may not have been completely accurate. But as I spoke about earlier in the show, they had observed institutional failures before.

And Trump said, I'm the guy who's going to do totally different than institutions. come to me, I'll save all of this stuff. They wanted someone who promised the type of change that was different than the type of change they had been promised previously. So I understand that. But they were not hardcore ideologues. And now that they have no ideological compunction to say the Republican Party is my party. And they see Trump failing on everything.

More of them are willing to come forward and say, I was fooled. It was stupid. It made no sense. We got to stop this guy. Let's hope that we see more of them. A Fox News host suffered psychosis on live television. I have a clip from Fox News that will make North Korean state television look like child's play. Here's Maria Bartaromo from Fox News.

This is going to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up if you have such hairs on the back of your neck. I don't think I do. I'm going to play the clip for you once through. It's only 41 seconds. This pathetic, cowardly, demented, psychotic excuse for a news show. And then I'm going to go back and really analyze it in depth just to show you the scope and strength of the delusion that these defenses of Donald Trump have become.

And there's a reason that these defenses are so insane because Trump is the worst person at delivering on any of his promises. because they can't tout that Trump has achieved anything, they have to do this sort of thing. Take a listen. If you're eating, you might want to stop. Sunday morning futures has been one of the leading critical journalists scrutinizing this mismanagement for the last 10 years from the made up Russia collusion story against President Trump, which ripped the country apart after President Obama used his FBI and CIA to try to take down his political enemy before a duly elected president Trump,

even got into office in 2017, with the agencies continuing to surveil and spy on him while he was a sitting commander in chief in the Oval Office, to the coordinated attack on the American people to hide serious mental incapacities of President Biden by using a small group of unelected officials and an auto pen to govern. Sunday morning futures has been one of the elite. Does anybody remember when Maria Bartaromo was doing good interviews with CEOs on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. I was 16 years old at the time. She's fallen very, very far from that. So let's go through it now with fact checks.

Sunday morning futures has been one of the leading critical journalists scrutinizing this mismanagement for the last 10 years. So when she says mismanagement for the last 10 years, she wants to be attacking Democrats. That she's meaning it as an attack on Democrats on Biden. But 10 years are like going back to 2016, Trump was president for more than half of the time that she describes. So it's already kind of weird. From the made up Russia collusion story against President Trump. The made up Russia collusion story. It was proven and dozens were indicted and convicted. Russia did want Trump to win. They did attempt to meddle. No, Putin and Trump didn't meet and go, let's work together. No, that didn't happen. I don't know anybody who claimed that that happened. But the made up Russia

collusion story kept finding criminals. Which ripped the country apart after President Obama used his FBI and CIA to try to take down his political enemy. Obama used the FBI and CIA to try to take down his political enemy. Let me explain to you what they mean by that. They love to say, Obama spied on Trump's campaign to try to take him down. What was going on. in 2015, 2016, was that the FBI totally separate from anything. Obama had nothing to do with it. The FBI, which was actually more, it's funny. Now, if the FBI does something, we go, oh, I'm sure Trump's in on it because Trump just tells Cash Patel what to do. Back then, Obama was not telling the FBI what to do. The FBI had a lot of different people under surveillance for potential

criminal behavior. And it just so happened that people associated with Trump's campaign were in touch with a lot of those people being surveilled. So incidentally, when they would have phone conversations with tapped phones, people would hear it. The FBI would hear that, hey, there's these Trump people. They weren't spying on Trump's campaign. And it wasn't Obama. Trump was in touch with a lot of suspected criminals who were under investigation. That's what they're talking about. Before a duly elected president Trump even got into office in 27. Now, what's funny about a duly elected Trump is they want to go like, listen, Trump was properly elected. He was properly elected.

So anything they did was inappropriate. For them to use the term duly elected is funny because we didn't question that Trump won in 2016. We didn't question that Trump won in 2024. They still can't admit Joe Biden simply won the election in 2020. And they want to play these games with listen after all, Trump was truly duly elected. With the agencies continuing to surveil and spy on him while he was a sitting commander in chief in the Oval Office. Now I looked that up spying.

They were spying on Trump while he was president. I couldn't. This is the first time I'm hearing of that. I know that they love they spied on my campaign in 2016. I've never heard they were spying on me as president. And I did a little bit of research. I couldn't find anything about that. If anybody knows what she's even referring to, let me know.

To the coordinated attack on the American people to hide serious mental intelligence. capacities of President Biden. All right, a coordinated attack to hide the incapacities of Joe Biden. Biden was declining. Biden shouldn't have run for reelection. There was an effort to hide that, to limit access to Joe Biden. And there's been a far bigger effort to hide Trump's health problems dating back a decade with propaganda letters, insistence on endless cognitive tests, documents that are not medical reports, but more like advertisements for Donald Trump's health, claims like Trump at 79 is healthier than Obama was in his 40s when he was president. That is really the effort that's going on right now.

We've covered the Biden thing. And it's not wrong. But it's really rich to hear from it from Maria about that when she doesn't ever mention it with Trump. By using a small group of unelected officials at an auto pen to govern. Okay. And then there's the auto pen. The auto pen is not a scandal. All presidents use the auto pen. There's no evidence Biden didn't know what was being done. Plenty of evidence that Donald Trump has no idea what's going on and regularly says so. We didn't have incidents where Joe Biden was asked, hey, XYZ happened. What do you, what do you think about it? And Biden goes,

I don't know anything about it. Oh, we're going to have to get back to you. Haven't been briefed on that. happens every week with Donald Trump. Sir, what's your reaction to X? Oh, I don't know. We're going to have what happened? Huh? Can you speak up? I can't hear you.

What? What is she saying? That's all the time with Donald Trump. 41 seconds of terror from Maria Bartaromo. And to think that she used to be a pretty good reporter. Behind every F-35 jet is a Canadian company. Horizontal tails built in Winnipeg, engine sensors from Ottawa and stealth composite panels crafted in Lunenberg to name just a few.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. The Pacman Show is an audience-supported program and the best most direct way to support the show is by becoming a member at join packman.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. Trump supporters have been tested on basic facts about how things are. And it was a complete and total disaster. And I think it explains a lot about how we got into this mess in the first place. You know, one of the things. I write about in my first book, The Echo Machine, is that we no longer have a shared basis

in fact in the United States. We might disagree about our conclusions or our opinions, even if we started with the same facts. But we unfortunately can't even get to that because so many people don't even acknowledge or know what the facts are. And it's impossible to make progress when that's the case. I'm going to give you some examples. There's an NBC news poll wherein 85% of Republicans said, if it's a public, if you're Immigration causes crime.

Immigration causes crime. Of course, if you believe that, you would want a whole bunch of different things when it comes to immigration than someone who understands that that's not true. Immigrants commit crime at roughly half the rate of native-born Americans. Both documented and undocumented immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native-born Americans. We have 150 years of data on this. But the Trump people that think what Trump's doing is great wrongly believe most of them, 85% of them, that if there are more immigrants in the country, documented or undocumented,

there's going to be more crime. In a sense, it makes sense to want less immigration if you've got the facts wrong about what that means. Now intuitively, I explained before, it does make sense. If you're undocumented, you know you. know you're undocumented. You are really incentivized not to have interactions with police or with law enforcement. Are you more or less likely to even jaywalk if you know, wow, if I'm in a show your paper state, jaywalking might lead to an interaction where they ask about my immigration status and I could

end up deported. Of course, you're going to be more careful when it comes to criminality. Now, I know that there are small portions of people. We talk about this when we say, does the death penalty dissuade people from committing crimes. There are people who are not going to be dissuaded no matter what from committing crimes in a country of 350 million people statistically. That's true. But big picture, more immigrants does not mean more crime, but 85% of Trump supporters believe that it does.

Texas, by the way, tracks convictions by immigration status because it is one of these states. Native-born Americans commit homicide at a rate of 3 per 100,000 and undocumented immigrants. at 2.2 per 100,000. Undocumented immigrants, forget about documented. Undocumented immigrants commit homicide at a far lower rate than native born Americans in Texas. That's not an argument for letting people in illegally, but it is a fact that completely contradicts what these right-winger believe. Another unfortunate reality about this is that the share of Republicans who believe that immigrants cause more crime has gone up, up, up as Donald Trump has been president. And so it's a reminder that the propaganda does work. The repetition does work. 12 years ago,

before the scourge of Trump rained down upon us like a plague, way fewer Republicans believed that more immigrants lead to more crime. Some did. It was like 20 something percent. Now it's way up. Okay, let's talk about tariffs now. Roughly 80 percent. of Republicans say tariff pain is worth it because it leads to good things economically, leads to good things economically. And about half don't believe that tariffs make inflation worse. That's from Ipsos ABC News. That is factually incorrect. Tariffs are an import tax. They are going to make things more expensive. This long-term dream of tariffs will actually lower, prices because it will be domestic production been totally debunked. It's bogus. It's not going to happen.

If Republicans knew the truth about tariffs, they'd probably be more opposed to tariffs, but because they don't know the truth, they go, no, I think that that's, that that's, it's a fine thing to do these tariffs. So the, the point I'm trying to make here is when the beliefs are wrong, when they don't know the fact, you get into these policy traps that have absolutely. no exit. You can't fix a problem that people, uh, if people believe there's a problem that doesn't exist, they are going to support policy that doesn't make any sense. And similarly, if there is a problem, but you don't acknowledge it, we're also not going to be able to fix it. So if you believe immigrants cause crime, you are never going to be okay or feel safe with

immigrants because you've assimilated a belief that is not based in fact. That frustration goes somewhere and it goes to, yeah, I'll vote for whoever tells me they're going to deport the most people, round up immigrants and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, there's another aspect to this that I think is important. When it comes to historical questions, Trump supporters also have no idea what's going on. And so if you go and you ask them, are their examples? Do you support cutting taxes for the rich? Yes. Why?

Well, because it's good for the economy. Got it. Can you give us some examples of when cutting taxes for the rich coincided with the largest periods of economic growth in the United States or anywhere? And they can't because it doesn't work. It doesn't happen. And so I think that acknowledging that a lot of these. Trump supporters lack some of the basic facts is important.

It's relevant. It's useful. But we need to make the focus. How do we get them to reconsider? Because at the end of the day, ha, ha, you don't know stuff might feel good in some way to some people. But it's not actually going to turn things around. Now, what's sort of ironic is that Donald Trump in a way has created an environment where a lot

of them are coming to these conclusions on their own. We had the caller into C-SPAN earlier today, and then we had one last week who have been able to step aside and re-examine their own beliefs critically and say, man, I fell for some stuff that's simply not happening. I fell for the economic messaging. I fell for the back in the first presidential campaign of Trump, China's the problem and I know how to fix this stuff and I'm going to fix it. And I was wrong about that. The fact that none of the promises are coming true from Trump are actually freeing some of the cult members to say, hey, maybe I was wrong about that. But on the facts, they don't know what's going on. And in a sense, we have to remember, if you believed that to be true, of course you would fall for this crap.

Let's now work on that aspect of it. So it turns out that I have a MAGA stalker. In fact, I have numerous MAGA stalkers. I didn't even know about it. How could I not know? Well, I'll tell you the way I found out about it is pretty surprising. And I actually, want to ask you, what, if anything, we should be doing about this. And it starts with something really funny. And then it kind of gets very sad. Some of you might remember that we had this voicemail line for the show. People would call in and they'd leave voicemails. And then we would go through them. And if there was something interesting or a question or a critique that was sort of substantive, at the end of the podcast, I would play one and I would react to it. We did this for a while.

And they weren't all positive. They weren't all negative. They might be complained. Some of them were insulting. But whatever. Eventually, we stopped doing it. Because the, audience mostly hated it. Most of the calls were very low quality. And as we would get more and more calls to the voicemail line, we were wading through dozens of calls a day to find a good one. Then hundreds of calls a day to find a good one. At one point, 400 calls a day to find one one. And it was quite difficult, to be honest with you, very time consuming, very annoying. And the eventual segment really didn't do well. Like a lot of people were just like, David, these voicemails are no good. Don't do this anymore. So eventually.

we stopped doing it. I think it was about two years ago. The other thing we did is when we cut that segment, we stopped checking the voicemail number. What was the point of checking thousands of voicemails a week when we weren't going to use them for anything? Over the weekend, we were doing some digital maintenance. I was cleaning out a bunch of stuff, closing out old accounts, turning off services we don't need or use anymore. And I stumbled across the voicemail line. And I was shocked to see even though we've stopped mentioning the voicemail number, we've stopped playing voicemails on the show. I think you know where this is going.

We've stopped promoting it in every way. The voicemails have been racking up for years now. There are tens of thousands of unlistened to voicemails in there. Now, just for nostalgia's sake, I said, let me click into a couple of these and listen, just to see what there is. And I came across some furious unhinged MAGA voices, some of which I recognized because they were people that were calling regularly back in the day when we were actually playing some of these voicemails. And a couple of them were leaving three voicemails a day.

I looked over the weekend. And on Friday, they had left three voicemails on Friday. So I said, let me look back a little further. And on Wednesday, they had left four voicemails. And the previous Monday, they had left five voicemails. So I went back a little further. And I went back to the last month. And they're leaving me three to six voicemails a day.

And then I went back to six months ago. And I went back to 12 months ago. And there is a Maga stalker leaving me three to six voicemails a day for years at this point in time. This is hours and hours of leaving me voicemails. And we haven't forget about played. We haven't even listened to a single one in years. This person is furious with me.

They are breathlessly slamming me for all of my takes one after another. And it's been years. We haven't heard a single one of these. Now, there's a funny like ha ha element to it. You know, it is funny. Someone's been doing this for years wanting to get a reaction. No one's even been listening to it. I didn't even know that they were doing this.

But it's also really sad. I think in a lot of ways. Like, what is going on in your life? How bad is your life that you're spending hours a day for years calling me? And I kind of think about, you know, I've never called any show I've watched. I've just never tried to get in touch with any show I've watched. I've never left a comment on a YouTube video. And if I ever did it, they wouldn't be these antisocial screeds indicative of pretty

severe mental illness, but that's a different story. So it kind of got me thinking about this whole thing of young men in today's society. The callers who do this are 99.9% men. We wonder how do these guys end up astray? They're often in cells. They want mostly they want girlfriends. They're unable to find them. They're unable to even convince anybody to go on a date with them.

They get angrier and angrier and antisocial and sometimes violent. A lot of them maybe have almost no meaningful contact. with the real world, with people with real relationships, because they're spending hours every week calling me, which I can't imagine they would do if they had a lot going on in their lives. I don't want to say they have a full-time job calling me, but three to six voicemails a day. They're all the full. The thing stops after three minutes. So that's nine to 18 minutes a day, every day, every week, every month for years.

Think of that. So there is a funny thing to it. There's also, you know, societally, this is very bad. Now, in addition to this one guy who's been calling three to six times a day for years, there's a whole bunch of people who call once a day. There's a whole bunch of people who call a couple times a week. A lot of people are out there, lonely, sad, nothing better to do than call my voicemail number furious with me. So here's my question. Do we just go in and shut down the voicemail number once and for all? And it'll just give an error message when people try to call and just end this insanity? Or do we just leave it open? Nobody's

listening to it. You're yelling into the void. But is there some value to being able to just call and yell at me even though nobody will ever hear it? I don't know. It's all a pretty sad state of affairs. And what it says about the state of the country is depressing. Let me know what you think. Info at David Pakman.com or leave me a voicemail. We have a great bonus show for you today. Trump is dropping his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, but why? Donald Trump's Republican revenge tour is reaching its final tests. And Colbert heads into his final late show week and he's going to be making fun of CBS. Is that going to get litigious? Well, we will talk about all of it and more on today's bonus show. Sign up. Get instant access at join packman.com.