The David Pakman Show - Something isn’t right in the inner circle

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

-- On the Show -- Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Gavin Newsom lead early Democratic polling for 2028, but none seem likely to unify the party -- Donald Trump builds support through identity and loyalty rather than policy, which allows contradictions, failed promises, and blame shifting to be accepted by supporters -- Trump allies increasingly reinterpret and manage his statements instead of repeating them, revealing a loss of internal confidence and a shift from loyalty to damage control -- Donald Trump's absence during key moments shifts real decision-making to figures like JD Vance and other officials, creating a fragmented leadership structure -- Trump's allies pursue rule changes and enforcement presence to tamper with the 2026 midterms, fueled by bogus claims of widespread voter fraud -- Donald Trump repeatedly announces aggressive policies that face immediate backlash and are then delayed, revised, or abandoned -- Donald Trump's policies like tariffs, war-driven energy spikes, and healthcare uncertainty, disproportionately raise costs and instability for his own voter base -- On the Bonus Show: Trump vows to send Iran back to the Stone Age in an unhinged speech to the nation, and much more... 🩳 Quince: Get free shipping & 365-day returns at https://quince.com/pakman 🩳 SHEATH Underwear: Code PAKMAN for 20% OFF at https://sheathunderwear.com/pakman 🩳 SHEATH Underwear: Code PAKMAN for 20% OFF at https://sheathunderwear.com/pakman 🧠 Try Brain.fm totally free for a month at https://brain.fm/pakman 💻 Sponsored by Private Internet Access: 83% OFF + 4 months free at https://www.piavpn.com/DavidP 🔊 Blinkist: Read a nonfiction book in just 15 minutes! Try it FREE at https://blinkist.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 (01:21) Divided Democrats lack consensus candidate (09:01) Trump support driven by identity loyalty (19:17) Allies shift to managing Trump messaging (25:36) Trump absence shifts real decision making (34:41) Efforts reshape rules for 2026 election (44:04) Trump policies face backlash and reversals (50:32) Trump policies hit his voters hardest Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Democratic primary for 2028 is already taking shape. The people leading are strong, but they are not universally liked even within the Democratic party. That matters a lot. We're going to talk about why. This is about a lot more than who is polling well today. It's really about who can build the coalition that's big enough to actually win. There is not an obvious consensus right now.

At the same time, there's something else going on that should concern you even more. The inner circle around President Trump is behaving increasingly differently. They are not getting any more loyal. They are getting less loyal. They're hesitating to throw their support behind whatever Donald Trump does. They are reinterpreting what Trump says. And I believe that this is a sign that they are no longer following him. They are managing him.

And that raises a serious question. If Trump isn't running things when he's sundowning. or at Mara Lago, who is? We're going to break that down. Later, I will tell you about the groundwork to try to rig the 2026 election. Fortunately, there are things we can do to prevent that from happening. That's the good news. Listen, I don't know what you care about heading into 2028.

I'm going to be very transparent about my priority. My priority is making sure that we do not end up with a number of. another lunatic authoritarian dictator wannabe in power starting in January of 2029. That is sort of my starting point for looking at early 2028 polling. This really isn't about who looks good right now. It's who can win. That's the most important thing. Can the left finally get some power back?

And when you start looking at new 2028 polling numbers that we have, something jumps out that a lot of people aren't talking about yet in a clear way, which is that the people leading Democratic polling are not universally liked even within the Democratic primary itself. There is an important distinction between can they win a general election and can they even win a Democratic primary? So we have a new Emerson poll. The poll looked at how Democratic voters view potential 2028 candidates and how they say, they stack up right now.

And one of the interesting things, take a look at these numbers. Kamala Harris, who I've said I don't believe should run. Kamala Harris is at 79% favorable. AOC is at 71% favorable. Gavin Newsome comes in right there at 70% favorable. Those are good numbers. There's no question about it. They clearly put Harris AOC and Newsome in the sort of top tier at this stage looking only

at favorability. But every single one of those candidates has a significant portion of the party that's just not on board with them for different reasons. You know, there's the Kamala Harris skepticism from a lot of directions, including people who question her political instincts, those who say, if you just lost, should you be the nominee again? That doesn't make sense or that she's not left enough or whatever. There's a lot of different reasons that some were saying.

Kamala Harris is not a good idea. There's a bunch of enthusiasm behind Congresswoman AOC, especially among progressives in the Democratic Party. But there are a lot of voters in the Democratic Party that just don't think that she is experienced enough or that she really can't win a general election. Now, we're going to come back to this idea of, but can they win the general? You then have Gavin Newsom. Gavin Newsom, interestingly, has built solid support, but he has a reputation for being polarizing. One view is polarizing is bad. Another view is no, polarizing is good.

You want about 30% of the population hating you because it generates media. And then there are people on the left who simply don't like him for policy reasons. You then have, you know, even somebody like Pete Buttigieg. He polls well nationally, but he doesn't unify the party. In a recent poll, he was polling 0% among black Democratic primary voters. And he's not really generating enthusiasm in any kind of serious way. So if we step back, what we end up with is this potential democratic field where the top candidates are strong in their lanes, the people who like them really like them, but none of them seem to be

dominating across the entire party. Now, there's reasons that this is very important now in 2026 and there's reasons that it really isn't so important. I'll give you both. The reasons that this matters in 26 is because, number one, this primary clearly is going to start earlier than any primary we've seen. And number two, there's the idea that in order to win nationally, you really need to be able to coalesce all wings of the Democratic Party and those who may vote in a Democratic primary upfront,

that that is the way to prove uniting the Democratic Party is the way to prove that you can eventually win. Now, not everybody believes that. There are those who believe that if you win the Democratic primary, it doesn't matter whether it's an overwhelmingly uniting win or it's not. It's just barely by the skinnier teeth. That all that matters is that you survive the primary and come out the winner and that the general election is different. There's independence who don't participate in primaries in some states. There's moderate and disaffected Republicans who may consider Okay, so that's sort of two different views as to the importance of unifying. But there's no denying that there are different groups that have to coexist within a coalition.

It's not necessarily center left Democrats and the progressive wing. But if you can't unify center left progressive, center left Democrats in the progressive eventually, then it's going to have to be a coalition that involves some Republicans or more independence or nonvoters. So eventually you get to the general election. This is where some of these candidates become more interesting. I'll give you an example. I think Newsom is more interesting than Harris in a general election.

The common refrain is a lot of people hate him. He would be very easy to run against. He's to California to be viable nationally. By the way, Kamala Harris is also California, but that's a different story. And so some go, oh, no, I don't know, but he's better than. Harris, then there's the AOC sort of consideration. She is certainly more passion inspiring in younger and further left voters. But would the donors get behind her? I think if she were the nominee, the donors would get behind whoever has a chance to be president at the end of the day.

Now, let's step back from all of this because there's a very important caveat, which you have to take into consideration. We are really far from the actual election. This early, a lot of these polling numbers are simply name recognition. Kamala Harris is very recognizable. She was the nominee last time. She was the vice president while being the nominee last time. People know AOC. People know Gavin Newsom. And so it is totally plausible that these numbers are just not predictive of what's going to happen in 2028. I will remind you that in all recent elections, whoever was most talked about, two and a half to three years out was never the eventual nominee. Counterpoint, this time is different.

Counterpoint, this time, there's an earlier discussion of who people want, and therefore you can trust the polling to some degree. So Democrats are going to have to figure this out. There are major implications for 2028 because the path to winning is going to run through coalition building. It's not going to be universal agreement. It's who can we bring in. There are some on the.

left already saying here's my list of I would never vote for and I've heard the people who go I would never vote for Kamala. I would never vote for AOC. I would never vote for new some. I would never. We're all going to have to really think about the options. And the way I approach this is when there's a primary, I look at my options and I pick the best option. When there's a general election, I look at my options and I pick the best option. And at the end of the day, whether you call it harm reduction, picking who you like or whatever, my goal is no more wannabe dictators after January of 2029. Let me know if you agree. Let me know if you disagree. How do people fall in line with authoritarian's in the first place?

How do people end up voting for someone like a Donald Trump, even when his policies and his decisions often work against the interests of the most ardent supporters? This is a bigger question than Trump. This is about how do these charismatic authoritarian leaders suck people in and rope them in in in the first place. It is not a process that starts with policy. It mostly is about identity and charisma. If you go back to the beginning, Trump did not ask voters, nor did he give them the opportunity, by the way, to evaluate detailed policy proposals. He would go, oh, yeah, we're going to replace Obamacare with something big and beautiful. Oh, yeah, no one understands trade better than me and China's screwing you and I'm going to

fix it. But what Trump did that all authoritarian do is he framed this as an opportunity for people to be part of a movement bigger than themselves, which is very cult like and you sometimes see it in religious belief as well. It is a fight against the elites, against the system that's screwing you, against forces that are responsible for why you're not doing well or you're frustrated or the point is the emotional connection is often the first thing with these authoritarian. And so when you say here's who I'm supporting, and we saw this early, when it was like

two to three percent for Ted Cruz in 2016, 2015 and two to three percent for Trump, the people supporting Ted Cruz were like, listen, I'm evangelical. Abortion's important. Ted Cruz is the choice. The people supporting Trump, overwhelming. were already borderline cultists who had gotten sucked in by the cult of personality. Once you lock in support of an identity or you see a candidate as a symbol more than a set of policies, everything just accommodates to that.

The promises don't have to be consistent. Remember, with Trump, it was like, yes, you got to punish the woman if she gets an abortion. The next day, no, actually you don't. Pick whichever one you like. Who cares? The promises don't even have to be fulfilled. I will build a wall on the Mexican border that Mexico will pay for. Didn't happen.

They forgave them. Most of them didn't really care. And so in order to understand why people fall for authoritarian leaders, you kind of do have to start with cult psychology. Loyalty is the primary thing that gets rewarded. If you doubt the dear leader, it's almost like a betrayal. Any criticism from those outside the movement is proof that they are attacking us and we've We've got to fight them even harder.

And you see it constantly in Trump world. When something doesn't work for them, the tariffs, which were going to save us, but they led to higher prices, healthcare plans that don't materialize or when they do, they're terrible for people. No more wars and then he starts a war with Iran. The explanation is never, oh, I had a bad idea. The tariffs were a bad idea. Sorry guys.

The Iran war was a bad idea. Whoops, my bad. Instead, there's some other reason. The Federal Reserve screwed us or the NATO countries wouldn't come and help us open the straight of Hormuz or whatever. And what this does is it always allows the core belief to stay intact. It's similar to when these cult leaders say, doomsday is what was the one, April 21st of 2012, the rapture.

And then the rapture never comes. And people go, oh, well, it sounds like your dear leader was wrong. No, no, no, no. He was accounting for the Mayan calendar with the wrong offset and it turns out that the date is actually different. We've heard it. We've heard it before. And so where you end up is with that kind of cult like framework.

And then you add to that the claim from Trump's, some Trump supporters that Trump's not really in control, that there are other forces operating behind the scenes. Now, we're going to deal with who those forces may be later in the show. But think about the contradiction that that creates. Normally, that should break confidence. If Trump is really in charge, he's responsible. If he's not in charge, why would you support someone who's not really in charge? But instead of causing people to go, wait, that doesn't make sense.

Why do I support this guy? It ends up reinforcing the cult leader because it gives the supporters a way to protect their image of Trump while explaining away anything that doesn't make sense. He gets the good outcomes and the bad outcomes end up being blamed on somebody else. Could be Joe Biden, could be Barack Obama, could be someone else within his administration that stymied him or turned against him or was low IQ. None of this is new. Like it's new in the sense of seeing it in an American president.

But this is classic authoritarian dynamics. The leader is the most powerful. and all knowing person, but at the same time, they're not really responsible because all these terrible people are getting in his way. Strong enough to deserve all of our loyalty. But if anything goes wrong, we don't blame. No, it must have been someone else's fault. This is how you end up with people getting sucked into these authoritarian movements and then continuing

to support them as they experience their stuff getting more expensive. As they experience economic instability. as they experience promises like no more stupid wars broken and creating an economic situation that is terrible for them. So these are not people that evaluate at the level of personal impact. If they did, they would go, I'm done with Trump. They are thinking through Trumpism. And this applies to other authoritarian at the level of identity, loyalty.

And let me find explanations that protect the dear leader and also protect my judgment because I don't want to feel stupid. I don't want to feel like I was duped. Once you have that system in place and Trump has had it in place since before he won in 2016, I would argue, it is really difficult to break that. It's tough to break out of it. That being said, there are people who have done it. And as I've said before, we should welcome them.

We should applaud that. We should remind them. It was predictable. We figured it out. We didn't fall for it. So it was possible not to fall for it. But after falling for it, it's a great thing that you figured out a way out. The better and more difficult issue, of course, is how do you prevent them from falling in the

first place for this stuff? Part of it is about education. Part of it is about Democrats offering something that is tangibly better economically and plausible such that people don't get sucked in by these guys in the fact. first place. Not the easiest thing to do. A lot of men's clothing forces the same bad trade-off. If the material feels good and the fit is decent, the price is ridiculous.

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supported program. I would find nothing more humbling than for you to join the ranks of the supporters of my show. The two best ways to do it. Get a membership on my website at join packman.com or get a substack premium membership at substack. Davidpackman.com or do both. We estimate several hundred members have memberships to both. Appreciate you. Appreciate everybody. Independent media is really up against it and what we are doing everything we can to fight back. If we want to understand the current state of the Trump era, as we might call it, we need to stop looking at Trump and start looking at the people standing behind him. I believe that this is where the real story is hiding. And I believe that if Democrats don't understand this going into 26 and especially 28 could be another

bloodbath. There has been a big shift in the sort of atmosphere around Donald Trump. It is not a subtle shift. It's very noticeable when you look. You see it in the press conferences. You see it in cable news hits. You see it in the hallway interviews with Republicans. We used to spend time debating the content of Trump's speeches. Trump was a belligerent or shrew. sharp or confused or whatever. The signal is increasingly what is happening after Trump speaks when allies in his party are forced to stand up there and explain what happened and either defend it or not defend it. Now a few years ago, these were instant defenses.

There was the cleanup crew came out and they didn't really feel like they were doing cleanup. They were excited. They weren't second guessing Trump. They defended everything. everything Trump said exactly as he said it. You heard the man, right? It was sort of that level of support. That's gone.

And if you watch now, you see the pauses. You see the caveats in the language. You see the hedging. And when they are asked straightforward questions, Trump said X, Trump did Y. You see a moment of silence, the gears trying to grind their rust off of them. And what Republicans are increasingly thinking about is not how do I forcefully support the dear leader. It's how can I answer this without screwing myself by signing on to cuckoo for cocoa puff stuff

that Donald Trump either said or did. It's like a translation layer. Hey, Trump just said something completely whacked like, oh, it's good that Robert Mueller is dead. Do you agree with that? Well, listen, what I think the president is getting out is that he's been treated unfairly. And what I think we really need to be focused on here, focusing on here is if we step back and look at the bigger picture, we need to make sure that the DOJ is not being well. These are becoming sort of like rescue missions.

I need to save myself. And the flat out the president is right. You are hearing less and less and less of that. Now, I believe that this shift is most visible behind the scenes. It's not visible to us, but it's visible to the people around us. Trump. If you look at how policy and day-to-day operations are being handled, it does not feel like this is top down from Donald Trump.

Now, who is in charge we're going to get to? But the point is, it seems as though people are building around Donald Trump because the plans never quite align with Trump's rhetoric and messaging. And so there's pivots, pivots, pivots. The decisions aren't being made so much to follow Trump's direction. are being made to limit the fallout. And this points to what for a lot of these Republicans as we approach 2028 is going to be a really difficult thing to figure out.

Trump has massive power, but power and respect are different things. We are seeing a total evaporation of Republican respect for Trump to the extent that it still existed a year ago. Nobody is going to say it out loud unless they have nothing to lose. Marjorie Taylor Green quit. But she has nothing to lose. So she's saying it. But most of it's political suicide if you have something to lose.

And so they're not going to say it, but we see it with their behavior. When you respect the leader, you take their words and you carry them forward, you know, like the Olympic torch. When the respect fades, you treat their words like, okay, this is a fire. I've got to contain the fire. They set a fire. If I put it out, he'll be mad because you wanted the fire. But I don't want the fire to get bigger.

Let me just do what I can to keep the fire roughly. the same size. It's not going to get bigger, but it's not going to get smaller. And that attitude is growing. Once the people in the system start hedging and kind of distancing and protecting themselves, you have a dynamic that's permanently broken. Trump's entire political identity is built on the idea that he's the one person in charge, everybody else is passengers. He's driving the bus. Everybody else is sitting there listening to music or doing whatever. And what we're seeing is that in these small moments, we have the erosion. It's a repetitive pattern of the people closest to Trump realizing I got to stop being a disciple

here if I want to save myself. He's not going to be around forever. And this is behavior that starts to happen when the realization hits that the truth is not something Trump's going to be happy with, but just going with it is not something that's going to be good for my career. You've got to find something in the middle. This gets us to who is really in charge right now, which I want to take a look at in a moment, but importantly, remember that as we head into 26, especially if Democrats win the House,

the Senate is in play, you know, it's roughly 50-50, but especially if Democrats win the House, you were going to see a Trump that goes completely off the rails, cuckoo for cocoa puffs. And he is going to put a lot of people in positions of having to either do what Trump wants or not do it. And that's the next layer. It's one thing when Trump expresses an idea and they hedge and they go, you know, what I think the president was getting at is really this other thing. Okay, fine. We can see what you're doing, but fine. That's not about action. Once it's, hey, we lost. They're now subpoenaing me. Here's what I need you to do. Are you going to do it or are you not going

to do it? And I have been saying this for years. I believe that you will see Republicans peel off more and more and more off of Donald Trump as they realize Trump's going to be gone soon. And I need to save myself. The next question we have to answer is who's in charge right now when Trump is doing who knows what? Who is making the decisions at the White House when Trump is in Florida golfing or just sundowning and posting to social media? It doesn't seem like it's J.D. Vance. Could it be Marco Rubio? I want to kind of try to figure it out. Now, I do feel it necessary to issue a kind of disclaimer. This is not the old Biden is tired and has no idea what's going on talking point that we heard during Joe Biden's presidency. And the reason that this is not that is we have gaps where Trump is not there. We've had two periods

of nearly a week where Trump was just gone. We know of moments where major decisions were happening. And Trump is physically somewhere else when the Iran war was being launched and Trump was in Florida and J.D. Vance was in the situation room. So this is not an abstract, abstract question. Under Biden's presidency, you could say a lot of things about Joe Biden. And I said many of them. But there were no big moments where Biden hadn't been briefed, had no idea what was going on, wasn't in the room and the decisions were being made. We now have these stretches where we have no idea what Donald Trump is doing. Um, sometimes. it's 18 hours of the day where we know where he is and what he's doing for five or six hours.

And then he reappears. It's very tightly controlled. The events are staged. It's, you know, formal dinner with world leaders. And then he disappears again from any real time decision making visibility. At the exact same time, you've got policy and military operations unfolding. When the Iran strikes were launched, we have pictures of Trump at Mar-a-Lago. running things from a makeshift setup during a gala where it clearly wasn't even a skiff.

They had like black curtains totally insane from an informational security standpoint. And there's a picture of JD Vance at the White House Situation Room. Think about that. The vice president in the situation room during new active military operations and Trump is at a resort hosting an event. This is not about the way it looks. You know, the the defenders go, oh, you know, the, the, the optics of this administration are different. Trump's different. This is the structure of the whole thing.

And it really says something about how decisions are being made. Military operations don't pause because you've got a gala or because you want to golf. Strikes happen sometimes at 3 a.m. Targeting decisions have to be made. Responses to retaliation have to be acted upon. And so someone is actively directing that. And it is not always Donald Trump, even though we are told that it is always Donald Trump. Trump. Now, let's go back to what was being said about Joe Biden.

There was endless speculation and commentary that Biden was demented and had no clue what was going on and other people were making the decisions. Biden was present for every major decision and major briefing and operational oversight during his presidency. You might not have liked the decisions he made. You might have recognized that he was slowing down in his age, which of course he was, but we are not dealing with speculation here. dealing with what we see, these absences of Trump during critical moments, the task force

to eliminate fraud. Remember that? It's this major Trump initiative, but he announced that and put J.D. Vance in charge. And it's being executed across agencies. Trump's not involved at all. And the question that keeps coming up is if Trump is announcing policy but has no idea running it, who really is in charge here? Is it cabinet officials?

Is it military leadership that gets some directive? And then they just kind of go act on it and have to figure it out. And the answer is not conspiratorial. It's probably some combination of all of this stuff. But I would argue that that's a problem. Leadership is more than announcing decisions, especially when the decisions are really stupid. And a lot of these are. And when Trump is missing and we know that he's struggling physically and cognitively, we're

just kind of left on the outside and we're watching the system that's moving, but we don't know who's steering the entire thing. So when we talk about Trump sundowning, we might mean it in the in the way it's used medically where Trump has limited his schedule to mostly 12 to 5. And when he does evening events, he really seems slowed down. He doesn't seem with it. It's the cognitive aspect. But there's also sundowning as a question of just like, where is this guy?

What, what's he doing? What's he up to? And the deeper risk, I believe, is that when you have such a complicated adaptive system like like the United States operating without a reliable and continuous leadership presence, what the hell is going to happen when these decisions have to be made and Trump just isn't really with it? The only other aspect of this that I think is important to mention is that there has always been this idea with Trump that maybe we're better off when he's not being the president.

In other words, if he's really so incompetent, isn't it better for him to be golfing? We talked about this during Trump's first term. if you remember. There is some sort of practical sense in which that may be true, but the problem is Trump is still operating by setting the broader directive and leaving people who arguably don't even have all the information or resources to make decisions to make them. And so for me, at the highest level, if we have economic volatility, which we do right now, if we're in the middle of a war, you've got to have a consistent presence there. And when the consistency goes away, it's natural to say who is actually in charge.

Now, there are all sorts of names that are often filled in. I mentioned Vanson Rubio. Is Susie Wiles in charge? Is it Stephen Miller? Is it who the hell is it? Is it Trump's assistant who types out his truths? I don't know the answer. But we know because we've seen in other regimes when the leader is diminished and other people

are actually making decisions, it's rarely a good thing. As someone who spends hours every week in meetings, interviews, and long-form conversations, My biggest challenge used to be losing ideas the moment that the meeting ends or the conversation stops. And I would try using my phone, but it had a bunch of limitations and tradeoffs. And so I started using Plod as my note taking assistant. Our sponsor Plod lets me capture in person conversations and phone calls and online meetings. And it's all one workflow with a single click.

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We have the groundwork. We know what's going on. They're making the smaller moves. They're trying to make it seem routine so that no one will put the full picture together. And a lot of this is already underway in different parts of the system. Now, we've been covering them piecemeal over the last year. And we've got to put it together. We have the suggestions about deploying federal law enforcement near polling places.

under certain circumstances during the 2026 midterms, of course, for the purposes of intimidating people. It gets framed as we need the security. They're going to be there to protect people. There could be threats, which is, of course, something officials say would only happen in specific situations, but they want to leave that open. We will decide where we need to have federal troops. When you have that conversation, just suggesting that, it shifts what people see as normal during

an election. And at the same time, we've got people close to Trump who are saying we're going to make major changes to how elections are run. They have this attempt to give a county clerks the ability to say, I don't trust these results. So we're going to throw them out something that is supposed to be just a perfunctory role. They want to empower them to go, I don't think we're going to count these. So far, fortunately on that, they haven't been very successful, but they're still trying. They want to limit mail-in voting.

They want to tighten access to voting and to polling places. They want new rules you can quickly implement, which will make it more confusing for voters as to what is or isn't allowed. And of course, they've got the classics challenge voter roles, try to deregister people strategically, reinforce the idea that the process can't be trusted. Maybe people will just stay home. And so when you put all of these different tactics together, you make people believe in a broken system in order to make it easier to justify changing the system.

If people believe the system's working well, they would go, why would we make any changes? If people believe the system is not working well, they would be more likely to look the other way and go, yeah, systems broken, you should go ahead and make changes. Now the other important kind of difference that we are seeing in 2026 as compared to prior elections, from the far right and the MAGA people is that they seem way more willing to test boundaries that they weren't willing to test before. And you might say, well, they shouldn't really be willing to test that because, look, people have been indicted for their role in those fake slates of electors in 2020.

Yes. But the people in charge are fine. Local officials have been indicted. But Trump wasn't. National elected officials weren't. So, of course, they're incentivized to go. far can we go? What can we get away with this time? And so what they've done is a sort of shift of the Overton window where ideas around elections that used to be fringe or unthinkable,

they've pulled them into this totally fabricated mainstream. And they're talking about the need to do a lot of this stuff. They talk about it in hearings. You listen to Republicans in hearings and they go, here's the stuff we've got to do because of our unsafe election systems. In interviews and media, they talk about it. And so all of it together makes it. easier for people to accept this is necessary. This is okay. We should let them do it. Now, no individual action purging some voter rolls alone won't determine election.

But all of these different things together can absolutely create circumstances where the election is totally different than it would have been if it were free and fair. You add friction, you create uncertainty, you make it easier. to dispute certain elements of the elections, interventions become easier. And then the recent history where, you know, they didn't get away with it in 2020, but I think that they made progress in the direction of trying to steal an election. That was a semi-coordinated effort, which fortunately failed. But they learned from some of those mistakes.

And in 2024, the polling pointed to Trump's going to win. I know a lot of people in my audience didn't want to hear that. But the polling did point to Trump's polling better in the swing states and it's not looking good for Kamala. This time it's looking terrible for them. The things they didn't need to do in 2024, they do need to do this time because otherwise it looks like they're going to get absolutely crushed. So we need to be paying attention to the roadmap.

We need to understand how they are going to apply it. But I think that maybe the most important thing is what we can be doing. There are institutions, courts, and state officials that are not going to allow these lines to be crossed. But the risk connects to the actions that they're already involved in. So the most important part of this is how do we respond to what they are planning to do. The system is most vulnerable when turnout is low. When turnout is low, any one mechanism that they use statistically.

is more likely to impact results. The closer an election is, the more space there is for a dispute delay or alternative narrative, which we might call a conspiracy theory, to actually affect the outcome. Large margins make it really difficult. If we come out and vote in what for a midterm would be record numbers, we overwhelm their ability to kind of tweak around the edges and flip anything. We obviously don't want them flipping any result. We don't want them flipping any individual race.

We don't want them flipping any congressional district. We don't want them flipping a single precinct using this nonsense. And there's really only one way we totally control. Now, let's be fair. People like Mark Elias from the Elias Law Group, they are doing the hard work at the legal level to try to prevent this stuff from going anywhere. That's great. We should support them, of course.

But we don't control how they fight those legal battles. We're kind of deputizing them and saying, listen, Mark, you know what you're doing. You got to fight this. But what can we do? If we overwhelm the turnout that produces margins so big and decisive, their techniques aren't going to work. The clearer and more most more overwhelming the result, the better we are going to be positioned to prevent any of these, this funny business.

So you'd better bet that they're going to try it. But we've just got to get out there and vote. If you care about accessing the full internet, like content not normally available where you live, private internet access is the best tool for it. Our sponsor PIA is the only VPN fully optimized for fast downloads and streaming even in 4K. Choose from high speed servers in all 50 US states and 91 countries so you can access content that is blocked in your location like on the web on Netflix, Hulu. YouTube or new sites around the world, I use PIA to watch Argentinian soccer and free BBC shows

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subscription at Blinkist.com slash Pacman. Why does Donald Trump always chicken out? Like, what is he afraid of at the end of the day? When you look closely, you realize that this is far from a random pattern. It's a thing that keeps repeating itself over and over again. And the routine is usually as follows. Trump makes a big announcement with big confidence and sweeping claims about how everything's going to be awesome.

Right away, there's confusion about what he meant or what is actually happening or what he's actually doing. And then all of a sudden, we end up either backing off either in rhetoric or in policy. I'll give you some examples. Take a look at tariffs. Massive sweeping tariffs liberation day. April 2nd of 2025. Markets react.

A business is panic. And then income the carve outs. We're going to wait on these. We're going to pause those. We'll reduce this one. There's exemptions. We're going to walk it back. But then we're going to tariff China even more and Canada even more.

But we've had a very productive conversation. And we're going to back off of that a little bit. It's like on again, off again, on again, off again. Why is this happening? Well, with tariffs, it's because the economic blowback shows up almost immediately. And then all of a sudden the tough guy stance from Trump needs a little bit of tweaking in order to meet the economic reality. Look at the Iran war.

He launches strikes and crashes markets and sends oil prices soaring and gas prices soaring and it's all completely out of control and then very quickly He starts going well we've basically completed all of the objectives you you did what he talking about which objectives did you complete? Yeah, it's very complete. It's almost done actually and is he really backing off? Well, not really because he said it but then they do even more strikes oil shoots up and down and global markets panic and then he pivots to calming statements to try to help the market. And so within days, you always get escalation and de-escalation. You get we're doing this thing and we're certainly not doing this thing. Why would the fake news media tell you that? We go on some other issues now. Go back to his first term.

Health care. We will repeal and replace Obamacare with something better. In 2017, remember, they put a proposal together. And if it had been adopted as law, summer between 24 and 32 million Americans would have ended up losing health care within 10 years if that law had been passed. And so Republicans panicked, everybody panicked. And then we're off of that. And we have nothing to replace Obamacare with.

Obamacare has now been around 16 years. I don't think they're going to replace it, quite frankly. One other example. The Muslim ban rollout, which was this announcement about banning people from coming to the United States from certain countries supposedly because of terror, but they weren't even really the countries that have sent the highest number of terrorists to the United States. So it's announced and then there's legal chaos and then it's revised and then there's a lawsuit.

And then it's scaled back and then courts step in and withdrawing troops from Syria. Take your pick. It happens with all of these policies. So is this a strategy or is this incompetent? And the answer is yes. Yes to both. Both part of it is extraordinary impulsivity. And Trump loves making decisions quickly based on what he calls instinct, but often it's just

the last person to speak to him before he has to actually make the decision. And so instinct is like who caught my ear the second before it was time to announce this. The bigger issue for me is what happens next. In a normal administration, you test decisions before. they're announced. You do policy analysis. You consider the feasibility. You think dynamically about, okay, well, if we do A, it's not we do A and nothing else changes.

We do A and then other parties might do B and then see what's the total picture? With Trump, it's announcement. Reality flies in. And then all of a sudden the market crash or the gas price spike or the court intervention or whatever makes the original idea either fall apart or seem like a bad idea. And then the back tracking starts. Now, sometimes they will go, we have a clarification. We have a we're going to clarify something.

Or sometimes it's we're doing the thing we announced, but we're going to delay it. We're going to wait a little bit. Sometimes it's we have an even better version of what we were going to do. But the new version, interestingly and hilariously, doesn't do any of what was actually announced. Sometimes it's you just say you've done it even though you haven't really done it. Now there is a strategic layer to this. which is that by constantly shifting positions, you create confusion about what's real and what's

final and what's fake and what's just a mistake. And so supporters and Trump's been doing this, I've been talking about this for a decade now, supporters can latch on to whatever they like the most. And the critics end up in the situation where you go, look, this is what you said you're doing. Yeah, but we're kind of doing it this other way. We're doing this other thing. Now the cost of all of this is that policy is unsubased. stable and nobody knows what's really going on.

And that lack of predictability, that lack of stability is very bad for economies. And it's bad for people at the end of the day. People notice the pattern, announcement, confusion, clarification, reversal, backtracking. And then they go, I don't know that I can make any decisions based on what the president is saying. And so when you constantly are making announcements of things that are either impossible, bad ideas, or simply don't hold up, you put others in a position of being unable to be able to to make decisions. You make yourself an unstable steward of the economy and you make yourself a bad negotiating partner. Iran found that out when they were abiding by the Obama Iran nuclear deal.

And then Trump comes in and goes, I don't like this thing. We're canceling it. And so what did that tell Iran? It told Iran, we can't really trust the United States when we sign a treaty when we do a deal. And that, of course, was the catalyst for ending up where we are today. Trump does always chicken out for different reasons, but the primary reason is he's just not that good at this. I want to speak directly to the Trump voters now. If you voted for Trump once I want to talk to you. If you voted for Trump two or three times, I especially want to talk to you. Trump voters are hitting a wall that they didn't seem to have seen coming. And it is going to hit them harder than almost anybody else. Now, I, as a clarification, everyone is getting hurt by Trump in different ways.

But I'm going to argue that the red state Trump voters are the ones who are getting the pounded, getting pounded the absolute worst for a couple different reasons. First of all, what they voted for and what they're getting are very different things. And the gap is where the consequences really show up. You start with the economy. This is where there's this mismatch that is impossible to ignore and it is affecting people's everyday lives. Trump's promises were lower prices, stronger growth, economic stability. What we're seeing is the opposite, the complete and total opposite of that.

You look at tariffs. We're going to punish foreign countries and it's going to be great for Americans. These are import taxes. They're paid by American businesses or consumers. This means that prices go up on everything, especially on goods that working class people rely on the most. This includes cars and basic supplies, household items, all that stuff. Not everybody is hit equally by that. The rural areas are hit the hardest. Red states are hit the hardest. Working class people that are the core of Trump's base get hit the hardest. You consider

the Iran war. Escalation sent oil prices up and gasp, prices went up and when this happens, it affects everything. Transportation costs go up. Food prices go up. Things get more expensive across the economy. Markets go down. If you've got a 401k, it's losing value. And so people's retirement accounts all of a sudden start to point to you might have to work

longer than you were planning to. Gas prices are up. People have to consider expenses. The same voters that were expecting and. counting on economic relief and being saved by Donald Trump, they're now paying more. The economy is volatile. Their savings are shrinking. You look at healthcare.

There have been now 10 years of promises, 11 years, 10 and a half years of promises from Donald Trump about replacing the Affordable Care Act with something better. Never happened. Their one idea was terrible. So it leaves uncertainty. People's healthcare costs keep going up, fewer protections. And again, if you're lower income, if you are in a red state that already has an inferior safety net, you're going to get hit more. Now, then we get to like the really revealing aspect of this.

You are starting to see the Manosphere podcasters and the pro Trump online personalities expressing what we could call confusion. He made all these promises. I'm surprised. I'm shocked that he's not delivering on them. They sound surprised and they are acting as though something didn't go according to plan. Trump had every intention of doing this stuff, but he didn't. Let's figure out why. The truth is, all of this was predictable. How do I know?

Because I was predicting it. And so were tens of millions of others. The saving grace for the Manosphere podcasters is that they are wealthier than the average voter. So they are insulated from the real world impact of these policies. Higher gas prices, market swings, health care instability. These are inconveniences for the Manosphere podcast. who are like, I don't know, he told me he was going to do different stuff.

These are existential financial pressures on your average red state, lower to middle income Trump voter. The shock of the manosphere people is ideological. The shock of the voters is material. It affects their lives on a day to day basis. And meanwhile, the average Trump voter is the one that is put in a position of having to absorb the impact of what Donald Trump is doing. Remember, Trump decided we would sacrifice. Not he, we. I thought gas prices would go up even more. Trump famously said when he invaded Iran. He decided that would be okay

for you and for me. Doesn't affect him in any way. So that's where we get to the blame shifting, which is the next phase. If prices rise, it's not tariffs and Iran. It's got to be immigrants and too many regulations and too much social safety net or something like that. And when you see policy create outcomes that are bad for people, people get frustrated, and then they find a way to redirect the frustration, usually away from the policies that actually caused it. Remember, after Obamacare was done and Red State governor said, we're not going to do the Medicaid expansion.

A bunch of Red State voters said, screw Obama, I didn't get my health care. Well, that's not because of Obama. That's because of your red state governor. And so we end up in this sort of adverse selection, moral hazard kind of situation where voters who most depended on the promises they fell for are now the most exposed and they are in the position of having to decide who to blame. Unfortunately, a lot of them are not going to blame the right person, Donald Trump, but enough of them, I believe, are that this will be a disaster.

midterm for the Republican Party. We're going to do everything we can to make it happen. We have a phenomenal bonus show for you today. Sign up at join packman.com. I'll see you there.