The David Pakman Show - The Economic Collapse That Is Dragging Trump

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

-- On the Show -- Donald Trump highlights November job gains while burying October losses as unemployment rises to its highest level in more than four years -- Donald Trump prepares to remove FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino after their leadership failures create political embarrassment -- Donald Trump mocks filmmaker Rob Reiner after his violent death by blaming criticism of Trump rather than behaving like a president -- Donald Trump defends his remarks about Rob Reiner, shifts blame for mass violence, and contradicts himself on policy -- Republican officials publicly rebuke Donald Trump for mocking Rob Reiner, signaling a weakening hold over his own party -- Donald Trump faces demands to disclose medical and financial records after suing the Pulitzer Prize Board and triggering legal discovery -- Trump advisers reveal basic economic ignorance as Kevin Hassett struggles to explain why 25 percent GDP growth is impossible -- Dr. Mike dismantles Daniel Amen's brain scan claims by explaining why SPECT imaging cannot diagnose cognition or justify supplement sales -- On the Bonus Show: Trump declares fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction, Trump sues the BBC for $10 billion over an edited January 6 speech, Erika Kirk meets with Candace Owens amid conspiracy claims, and much more... 🍷 Naked Wines: Use code PAKMAN to get 6 bottles for $39.99 at https://nakedwines.com/pakman 🤖 Sponsored by Venice: Use code PAKMAN for 20% off a Pro Account at https://venice.ai/pakman ⚠️ Ground News: Get 40% OFF their unlimited access Vantage plan at https://ground.news/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 (01:47) Trump job numbers spin (09:24) FBI leadership shakeup (19:03) Trump mocks Rob Reiner (26:51) Trump defends Reiner remarks (34:27) Republicans rebuke Trump (39:53) Trump records disclosure pressure (46:23) Advisers expose economic ignorance (53:23) Dr. Mike debunks brain scans  

Donald Trump hits a new low today, turning a brutal double homicide into a truth social punchline, mocking a dead critic and blaming Trump derangement syndrome for a man and his wife being murdered. And for the first time in a long time, Republicans are not looking away. They're going after him. And we will explore whether this points to some kind of change. Trump then doubles down from the Oval Office and says the victim, Rob Reiner, was deranged, refuses accountability and is maybe his most disgusting moment ever and that really says a lot. We are going to do a deep dive into the jobs situation, jobs numbers that look okay at a glance,

but fall apart when you read past the first headline, rising unemployment, delayed data. It is the same old trick and it is starting to fail. Plus Donald Trump may be forced to hand over his medical records. After suing the Pulitzer board, there is a looming FBI shakeup as Cash Patel and Dan by Bonjino may be fired and a viral moment where Dr. Mike dismantles pseudoscience right to the purveyors face. It is chaotic. It is ugly. And we are going to look at what governing looks like when incompetence and narcissism collide. Also, David Pacman's show gear is available again. For now, you've got to find it on our merch shelf on YouTube. You just go to any of our YouTube videos. You should see some of the

items that are available. We will have a dedicated page. A lot of this stuff still can be delivered before Christmas, if you can believe it. And certainly before New Year's. Gear is back by popular demand. I'll have more information about that very soon. Well, I have to hand it to him. He almost got away with it. Donald Trump in the administration, if you only looked at the headlines this morning about jobs might have actually gotten away with it. You might have looked and said, oh, good. You look at November, the American economy created jobs. Everything's fine. Great.

64,000 new jobs in November, we are going in the right direction. And just like that, Trump and his White House cronies would have snowed you. They would have gotten away with tricking you and you would be none the wiser. But some of you might have thought to yourselves, hold on a second, November jobs numbers. Did we ever get the October jobs numbers? No, we didn't because the Trump administration canceled it. But now as a little bullet point along with the November numbers, we did finally get the October numbers.

And in October, the American economy lost, wait for it, 105,000 jobs. So to put it a different way, in October, we were minus 105. In November, we were plus 64. So over the last two months, we are minus 41,000 jobs. That's the reality of October and November in the jobs market in the American economy. But by delaying the October jobs numbers and now releasing them as a little aside, just a little footnote to the November numbers, the goal, what this administration wants, what Donald Trump wants, is for you not to know that.

October was disastrous and in fact so disastrous that we barely got back in November half the jobs we lost in October. Minus 105 October plus 64 November, we are minus 41,000 jobs. That's the reality over the last two months. We've also lost jobs in three of the last six months. That's the truth. Trump wants November plus 64,000 and that's it and go back to whatever else else it was. you were doing.

Also notable from the new jobs report, Trump and his friends talking only about we got 64,000 jobs in November, ignoring the October numbers, but the unemployment rate also went up to 4.6%. Now, 4.6% is not a disaster. 4.6% isn't a terrible number. But the important thing is that the trend line for unemployment is up, up, up inching closer and closer to 5%, which would start to look not quite. So good. But 4.6% unemployment, which is where the American economy landed in November, gets us to the highest

level of unemployment in the United States since September of 2021. We have more unemployment today in the United States of America than we have in more than four years. So this is about the economy. It's about working people. And it's also about propaganda and how the government communicates with us. Trump and his administration want you to believe that the country's economy is better than ever. Except if we take a motion out of it and we look at the data, over the last four months,

the economy has shed 41,000 jobs. We've had job losses in three of the last six months. The unemployment rate is the highest it has been in more than four years. And right now, 40% of Americans would have to borrow or put it on a credit card if they were hit with an unexpected $400. expense. And that is a real problem for the argument that this is the best economy ever, trademark. This is the pattern every time with this administration. They pick one number that sounds good. They bury the rest or forget that they've hidden it from you. They delay the release of numbers that would be inconvenient. They reframe the story and they hope that nobody

notices. And you move on to men and women's sports or some other culture war distraction. If you're only paying attention 50% it works. And most people, I sympathize with them, are busy working, raising kids, trying to pay their bills. And they're not paying attention 100%. And this is how you end up forgetting about the unemployment rate, forgetting about losing 105,000 jobs in October and going, oh, we got 64,000 jobs in November. Everything's fine, even though the trend says otherwise. Now, let's dig into the 64,000 a little bit. Gaining 64,000 jobs sounds fine in isolation, even if you were to forget for a moment that we lost 105,000 jobs in October. But economies, they don't really move in isolation. What I mean by that is they move over time. And the picture over time here is one of

deterioration and not strength. Minus 105 in October is not a rounding error or a fluke. That is a serious loss of real jobs. And when November only claws back part of it, the trend line is for losses and not growth. Rising unemployment kind of works the same way. 4.6 in and of itself isn't a problem. Unemployment rises by creeping. First, employers slow hiring, which we've seen. Then they cut hours. They forego raises. Then there's a hiring freeze. Then come the layoffs. And by the time that unemployment starts to really get higher, the damage has been building for many months, if not longer. And that's why these early increases matter. Another downtick in jobs, another uptick in unemployment, even when Republicans are just sort of waving the entire thing away. And so this is why

4.6% unemployment matters. It's not because 4.6 today is a crisis. It's because it tells you things are heading in the wrong direction. And the policy prescription from the administration is not going to fix it. In fact, the tariff policy specifically, as well as allowing health insurance premiums to skyrocket, all are going to have a negative job on small, a negative effect on small business, on people's individual jobs. And so when the direction is wrong, the trend is harder to spin. The way you try to spin it is by canceling the October numbers, focusing on the November ones, and then acknowledging as an asterisk at the bottom of the page that we did lose 105,000 jobs in October. So I want you to be more informed than that and not fall for those headlines.

Always read beyond the headlines. And by the way, remember caps, critically analyzed primary sources, listening to Caroline Levitt editorialized the jobs report. No. Now this, by the way, this is a difference between them and us. Even just listening to me editorialize the jobs report. Fact check it. I don't care if it's Caroline Levitt or me. Go to the. the source data, which, by the way, I'm transparent. We put a bunch of that reporting up on the screen straight from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Go and find the data yourself. Now, you could take issue and say, are we even getting real data from this administration? That's a different question. I can't fix that. I can't editorialize my way out of that. But fact check everything that I am saying.

They tell you they are the ultimate source of truth. I tell you, I'm doing my best to synthesize the information we're getting. Double check it. Fact check. me, I welcome that. That's a very big difference from some of these purveyors on the right. Okay. We now have multiple FBI sources that Trump is about to start firing people. Cash Patel, FBI director and Dan Bongino, deputy FBI director. There was a major shakeup reportedly coming.

And this tells us something bigger about how Donald Trump governs. And it really draws a very interesting distinction between the first term of Trump and who and how he hired then. and the second term of Trump. And I'm going to get to that in a moment. The reporting is FBI director Cash Patel reportedly on his way out. Deputy FBI director Dan Bongino already on his way out. The reason is not ideology or internal resistance. It is incompetence that has now become politically inconvenient for Trump. Trump is willing to tolerate gobs, just massive dumps of incompetence as long as it doesn't start affecting the perception of Trump.

And once that starts to happen, the heads typically start to roll. The trigger was reportedly, what's putting this over the edge, so to speak, is reportedly the botched FBI response to the Brown University shooting. You may remember that again, FBI director Cash Patel rushed onto social media to brag, oh, we've already got a person of interest. Within hours, Rhode Island's attorney general said, yeah, we released that person because there was no legal basis to hold them. They didn't have anything to do with the shooting.

It was not an isolated incident. He has jumped the gun many times. He makes these dramatic public claims. They end up walking them back. And it just makes them look really bad. And inside the FBI, morale is reportedly at an all time low because of the incompetence of leadership. And there are serious, if nothing else, there are really.

really serious people who work for the FBI. And they are saying the agency is in shambles under the leadership of these people. And it is because of Patel and Bongino. Bonjino situation is reportedly even more revealing. Staff say his office has been empty for weeks. Internally, he is seen by the FBI brass as unserious, unqualified, and more interested in maintaining his media brand than running the agency. One source reportedly referring to Bongino as a clown, this is not Democrats, you know, this is not Bernie or AOC.

This is Trump's own people and the staff inside of the FBI. What I believe makes this moment important and different is how it differs from Donald Trump's first term. During Trump's first presidency, Trump would often hire people who were at least marginally competent by traditional standards. So I'll give you an example. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. I don't want an oil man as my secretary of state. But at least in by the traditional sense of understanding how you relate to people, understanding diplomacy, understanding the responsibilities of a position, Rex Tillerson checked that box. And it could apply also in Trump's first term to some of the

generals, some of the prosecutors, some of the, you know, establishment people, career professionals who were put in positions of power. And during the first term, the reason it backfired wasn't because they were incompetent. It was because they weren't. And slowly but surely, as Trump realized, they seemed to be prioritizing something other than loyalty to me, Trump started pushing them out. They weren't necessarily bad at their jobs. They pushed policies I didn't agree with. But the winning president gets to do that. They left or they were pushed. out because they weren't loyal enough. And that started to become a conflict with Donald Trump. James Mattis is another example. John Kelly to a degree, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions. They were not

progressive heroes. They were not on the left. I didn't agree with them on policy. But at key moments, they might refuse to lie for Trump, for example, or refuse to break the law for Donald Trump or refuse to put Trump above an institution and its checks and balances. And for Trump, that was unforgivable. So that was the first term. Trump learned from that. And then the wrong lesson. I should, I should be clear. Trump learned if the people are competent and not loyal, it's a problem for me.

And so this time around, exactly as we were all predicting, loyalty was the primary prism through which Trump made hiring decisions. Trump put ultra loyalists in the administration, media personalities, ideologues, people who have spent years attacking the very institutions they are suddenly in charge of. And now we see the results. This time, loyalty is not the problem. The problem is the dysfunction and the incompetence. And you get leaders who don't know the difference between performative bravado and actually doing their jobs. And again, Trump doesn't care about the incompetence if until it becomes an embarrassment for him.

And that's where we are right now. And that is why Donald Trump is starting to turn on his own. Different scenario than in term one for different reasons. Trump is having to start to push people out, but just as disturbing. The part that should really worry people is that whenever Trump fires people, he usually puts in replacements that are more dangerous, sometimes by virtue of being a little bit less cartoonish. I'll explain because we've seen this pattern.

Think back to Donald Trump's initial second term nominee for Attorney General, former Congressman Matt Gates, a walking scandal, cartoonishly extreme, deeply unsurious. And that nomination failed because it was clear they weren't going to have Republican support. So Trump pivoted to Pam Bondi. Bondi is not less ideological than Matt Gates. Bondi is not less loyal than Matt Gates. She is more polished, though. She's more experienced.

She has slightly fewer scandals in her backstory. And therefore, she's in the more dangerous position of being able to get things done. In other words, Gates was worse in an obvious headline grabbing way. But because of that, he probably would have been less effective because incompetence can act as a sort of break. That's like not like a B.R A, K.E I'm talking about like a brake pedal. And professionalism removes the brake pedal and people with equally bad ideas can get more of it done. We're probably going to see the same dynamic play out here. If Patel and Bongino are pushed out, Trump is likely to replace them with people who are just as loyal, but probably more functional in some way.

Less cartoonish, fewer unforced errors, better at quietly bending institutions to Trump's will. So while the immediate story looks like chaos and collapse and all of it, the longer term risk is consolidation. And in Trump's first term, people were fired for not being loyal enough. In the second, they're being fired for being so damn loyal, but so incompetent that they become a humiliation to Donald Trump. The outcome is a system where loyalty to Trump matters most. What they're able to get done depends on exactly who he's replacing them with. So the report, Patel and Bongino out. My expectation is that whoever replaces them if the reports are true are going to be more effective at doing.

Trump's dirty deeds. Let me know what you think. Leave a comment. Make sure you are subscribed to the YouTube channel as we approach 3.5 million subscribers. Who could have imagined a decade ago when we were just getting started on YouTube that we would be talking about 3.5 million subscribers. Certainly not me. That I can tell you. I love it when a box of bottles of wine from naked wines shows up at at my house. We unpack it. I'm partial to the white wine. My girlfriend is more partial to the red wine. Our sponsor Naked Wines is a wine club that will connect you directly with independent winemakers all over the world. This means you are getting world-class wine delivered to your door at up to 60% less than what you would pay in stores. And the reason is very easy. No middlemen,

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If that pleasure goes away, the show also goes away. I would love for you to get a membership at join packman.com. Also many free ways to support the work we do, including simply subscribing on YouTube, getting on my substack newsletter at substack.davidpack.com. Just liking and sharing the content. me say thank you to a couple of new members, Stephen Sweeney and Will Mayor, our newest David Pacman show members. You can join them at join packman.com. I want to propose to you today that Donald Trump's most vile, most disgusting, most horrifying

moment ever came quite frankly just hours ago. Now this is tough because Donald Trump has done so many horrible, terrible, disgusting things. It is hard to compare apples and oranges. And therefore, it is hard to compare Trump pulling food stamps from people versus bombing a ship allegedly filled with narco traffickers, but it's not really clear. Making fun of John McCain for getting captured during the Vietnam War. And then getting a doctor's note that says your heels hurt, your bones, you have bone spurs and your ankles or heels and you can't get drafted, right?

It's tough to compare those things because they're not. are very different. But from the standpoint of showing how as an individual person, Trump is morally depraved and totally vacant and vapid, this might be it. Donald Trump posted the truth social after the death of Rob Reiner and his wife, who were murdered brutally. Now it appears by their own son, Nick Reiner. Donald Trump posted the following to truth social. Quote, a very sad thing, this is disgusting to even read. A very sad thing. happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star,

has passed away, together with his wife, Michelle, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind-cripling disease known as Trump derangement syndrome, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people crazy by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump With his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness and with the golden age of America upon us, perhaps like never before, may Robin Michelle rest in peace. That's really from the president of the United States.

Just as an exercise in contrasts, remember when Charlie Kirk was killed? Some people said, you know, Kirk believed horrible things, but he didn't deserve to be killed. And the MAGA people went absolutely crazy. There is a basic moral rule that most people share. When someone dies especially violently, you either shut your mouth or you show a little bit of respect and compassion. And we expect this even from people that we dislike. We expect it even in war. We expect it on social media where standards are already in the toilet.

And Trump didn't do it. He didn't stay silent. He didn't offer condolences. He didn't even only insult Rob Reiner. He took a brutal death and turned. it into a punchline and a branding opportunity. Now, notes that Rob Reiner's reaction to Charlie Kirk's murder was very different, even though Rob Reiner disagreed with Kirk politically. Here is Rob Reiner weighing in on that on a prior episode of the Pierce Morgan program. You first heard about the

murder of Charlie Kirk. What was your immediate gut reaction to it? Well, horror, absolute horror. And I unfortunately saw the video of it. And it's beyond belief what happened to him. And that should never happen to anybody. I don't care what your political beliefs are. That's not acceptable. That's not a solution to solving problems. And I felt like what his wife said at the service

that the memorial they had was exactly right. And totally, I believe, you know, I'm Jewish, but I believe in the teachings of Jesus, and I believe in doing to others, and I believe in forgiveness. And what she said to me was beautiful and absolutely, you know, she forgave his assassin. Look at that. Look at the contrast there. No question who is the bigger man. Now, I think it's also worth pointing out that Donald Trump, I mean, listen, he seems unable

to resist impulse. And we're going to talk about that tomorrow. But Donald Trump's truth social post wasn't impulsive in the sense of he wasn't on stage at a rally with a crowd cheering him on. And he sort of got carried away and started insulting Rob Reiner. It wasn't like a hot mic moment or an off the cuff slip. He wrote it up. It was typed up.

It was presumably reread. someone thought about it, Trump thought about it, and then he goes, yes, let's post this. It wasn't like an adrenaline post or something like that. It's a guy deciding a double homicide is a nice vehicle for a truth social bit. And that really matters here. Now, what makes this arguably even darker is the inversion of reality. A man and his wife are killed and Trump doesn't assign blame to the person who did it. He doesn't point to the tragedy and instability of violence or what he blames criticism of himself for the reason that this murder took place. The logic is chilling. If you criticize Trump, you bring destruction upon yourself. That's not trolling. That's not a joke.

That is authoritarian thinking at its core. Now, compare this to how MAGA reacted when Charlie Kirk was killed. Many on the left said, I didn't like his views, but no one deserves to die for their politics and they lost their mind anyway. They, they insist that the left was cheering the murder of Charlie Kirk. So the obvious question is, what would they be saying if Biden had posted something like this? We already know the answer. They would be saying dementia. They would be saying 25th Amendment. They would be saying remove him now. If not worse, they would be calling for his head. And Trump is exempt from that. And this also isn't just cruelty. Because cruelty implies hatred and hatred implies belief.

And what is on display here feels closer to emptiness. There is no concern from Trump for the death or for grief or for family or for the violence. He just doesn't care. It doesn't register. The only thing that matters is can I bend this moment towards myself to take advantage of it? And it is a moral vacancy that is quite unusual in the general population. And so that's why as grotesque as Trump's policies can be taking food stamps from people, bombing this, bombing that. There is something different about this moment. You can repeal a law.

You can reverse a policy. You can cancel an executive order. This message shows you who Trump is at his core when nobody stops him. And power in Trump's hands is this disgusting response to human suffering. If it doesn't benefit him to care, he doesn't. And presidents, in a sense, do more than just govern. Trump doesn't govern, but at least presidents, some presidents govern. Presidents also set emotional norms and they kind of dictate the behavior that's acceptable. And this is one of the great tragedies of Trumpism over the last decade that Trump has disinhibited so many by showing that this kind of behavior is acceptable. Final little test here.

If a CEO posted a message like this, what would happen to them? They would be fired instantly. Any professor would be gone. Military officer would face discipline. spokesperson would be escorted out within minutes. But the president ends up being held to a lower standard, lower standard than a random intern. Why is that? You have to look at the American right wing. That's the only way to explain it. Donald Trump subsequently doubled down on what I believe is his most disgusting moment ever. He really seems to be on his last leg. I think Trump wants to

disappear and not do any more politics, but he's got no choice because he's in office. And his narcissism and mental instability are really exploding. Donald Trump was asked, what do you think of the fact that many Republicans are denouncing the statement you made about Rob Reiner's death? Many Republicans say it's a bad statement. Trump doubles down and says he was deranged and then also refers to himself in the third term, in the third person. A number of Republicans have denounced your statement on true social after the murder of Rob Reiner. Do you stand by that post? Well, I wasn't a fan of his at all.

He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned. He said he knew it was false. In fact, it's the exact opposite that I was a friend of Russia controlled by Russia. You know, the Russia hooks. He was one of the people behind it. I think he heard himself in career-wise. He became like a deranged person, Trump derangement syndrome. So I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all in any way, shape, or form.

I thought he was very bad for our country. Yeah. Trump with really, speaking of deranged, deranged narcissistic behavior. Now, it's true. Rob Reiner didn't like Trump. That's called speech. People deserve to die for speech now. I thought that the whole thing with Charlie Kirk was he didn't deserve to die for speech. But Rob Reiner does deserve to die for speech. Maybe it's because these people don't give a damn about their principles. The principles are something to point to until they become inconvenient. And then you just reverse. And then nobody cares about the double standard. Nobody on the right cares about the hypocrisy anymore.

Now, there were a couple of other things from Donald Trump's Oval Office ranting that I want to mention. One is that Donald Trump was asked about the fact that the FBI again said, we've got the person in the Brown University shooting. And then it turns out that they don't have them. And Cash Patel reportedly is on his way out. Zero accountability is always Donald Trump going. That's just a Brown university problem. That's it. The whole thing is their problem.

Hopefully they're going to capture. Has Cash Patel told you why it's been so difficult for the FBI to identify who the shooter is? Well, it's always difficult so far. We've done a very good job of doing it with Charlie, with, you know, the various times this has happened. They've done it in pretty much record time. But you'd really have to ask the school a little bit more about that because, you know, this was a school problem.

The party of personal responsibility. Their own guards had their own police. had their own police, they had their own everything, but you'd have to ask that question really to the school, not to the FBI. We came in after the fact and the FBI will do a good job, but they came in after the fact. You know, it's not exactly accountability when it's always somebody else's fault, interestingly, and by the way, there are images of the alleged shooter. It's like a 5-8 rotund guy, very portly with a waddle. I actually, I have a friend. who is roughly this build, who said, uh, who lives not altogether far from where this shooting

took place. Who said, damn, that looks a lot like the, like not, not with the waddle, but five, eight portly guy. Uh, he's like, I'm going to stay home for a while. The last thing I want is someone saying might, might this guy be the shooter, uh, regardless, cash with hell. Once again, we've got someone in custody, some person of interest. And then that individual is released because they had absolutely nothing to do with the shooting.

A so-called journalist, and I use that term very loosely, asked Donald Trump about another pardon, another crypto bro pardon. And Trump's kind of like, I don't know a thing about it, but like, yeah, maybe look into it, Pam Bond. This week, a man named Keone, Rod Vigas, is going to federal prison for creating crypto privacy software. The case was started under the Biden administration, but your DOJ kept it going and secured the conviction.

A lot of people in crypto are saying that this man should be pardoned. Are you familiar with the case at all or would you be interested? I've heard about it and I'll look at it. Why you think you should be pardoned? Sounds like it. Sounds like based on your question. Rodriguez, we'll look at that, Pam. Okay.

Let's take a look at it. You'll have to tell me. I don't know anything about it, but we'll take a look. On Friday. Oh, man. It's like, what's worse? The really dumb question or Trump's answer or the very obvious nature of Trump will kind of do whatever people tell them to do.

Then Donald Trump lets he let a really stinky one go. Trump puts forward the idea that tariffs really work well, but only in the United States. The implications of this are absolutely stunning. You know, tariffs really work, in my opinion, almost only in the United States. Oh, that's the best. So listen, other countries should not put tariffs on us. The tariffs will work well if we put them on other countries because we are the United States. But if other countries use tariffs on us, that really doesn't work.

The United States is unique in that we are the only country that really benefits from using tariffs. And then finally, Trump coming across something that is true and something arguably we should be thankful for. Listen to this. There's nothing like what's happened in the last 10 months. Thank God for that. Fortunately, we, we, I know Thanksgiving was several weeks ago, we should really be thankful,

thankful that we have never seen 10 months in the United States like the last 10 months. Trump finally stumbling across a little tiny bit of truth. All right. So we all know Alexa listens to us, recommends products based on our conversations, meta retargets us based on our browsing and engagement history. Have you wondered what chat GPT and Claude are up to with your conversations? We feed so much of our information to these AI chatbots, thoughts, dreams, sensitive questions, business ideas.

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off their pro plan. The link is in the description. Something real and different appears to be happening within the Republican Party right now. It is not subtle. Let me explain what's going on. As you know, if you already listened to the first part of today's show, Donald Trump posted something so ugly and so gratuitous that Republicans didn't do their usual routine. You know the routine.

I didn't see the post. No comment. Let's move on. Donald Trump posted this disgusting comment saying that Rob Reiner and his wife, who were recently brutally assassinated, died from Trump derangement syndrome. More and more Republicans are going after him publicly. And nobody's forcing them to do it. And there are many who have been writing to me saying, David, this feels like something

a little bit different here. Now, of course, in his deranged truth social message, Donald Trump, he mocked Rob Reiner. He smeared Rob Reiner. He implied that Rob Reiner's death was because of criticism of Donald Trump. It was cruel. It was pointless. It crossed the line even for Republicans who have been defending just about everything else that Donald Trump has done.

Now, what matters here is not that some Republicans objected. It's who objected. It's not just swing district Republicans. It's not just the libertarians who already don't like Donald Trump. Even loyal Republicans stepped in. Republican Stephanie Bice flat out rebuked Trump saying this is a moment for prayer not politics. That would have been unthinkable from a sitting Republican in times past. And it's happening to Trump.

And the key part is that a lot of these Republicans are not waiting to be asked. They're not hiding. They seem very eager to make it clear that they find what Donald Trump said to be a major problem. Even on CNN News night last night, Scott Jennings said, who is the ultimate defender of Trump, wrote an entire book just sucking up to Trump, said something about, you know, I wish you wouldn't have said it, which for Scott Jennings, that's a massive, massive rebuke. One of the things that may be changing here in the sort of architecture of the relationship

between Trump and other Republicans is that for years, Trump ruled by fear. He ruled the Republican Party by fear. Threats to primary people. Threats to retaliate. We're going to exile you politically. The grip on that seems to be slipping. And party operatives are saying out loud, we are. less scared of Trump than even a few weeks ago. Why? Because Trump is losing fights that he used to

automatically win. Trump was unable to strong arm Indiana Republicans into gerrymandering their own state. A majority of Republican state senators voted against it anyway, despite the threats. That's new. Trump is still president. He still has the power of the presidency. But he is starting to look like a guy whose best days are behind him, whose most effective days are behind him. And by the way, he was effective at doing terrible things. But effective is still something that when it starts to go away, you notice the approval ratings are in the toilet. We know that.

Democrats are overperforming in elections in red states, in blue states, in down ballot races, and gubernatorial races. And Republicans are starting to look 10 and a half months down the line. Wait, 10. Yeah, 10 and a half months down the line at November. And they are saying, man, we could be in the after Trump era in less than a year. The Rob Reiner post serves as a good opening for some of them. There's no big Republican base demanding bloodlust over a murdered filmmaker, no grassroots

pressure to defend this, which means Republicans can push back without paying the usual price that they would pay for saying, I don't agree with what Trump did. I don't like what Trump did. That is, I believe, why you are seeing something that is rare. Republicans deciding the behavior isn't worth excusing anymore. politically. Trump doubled down, of course. We played it in the Oval Office. He said, oh, Rob Reiner is deranged and Trump doesn't like him talking about himself in the third person, making it all worse, making it harder for Republicans to say, I didn't hear about it. I didn't see it. I didn't

read it. I don't care. Trump's not gone, not even close. We talked last week about how authoritarian actually, it doesn't really matter if they're popular because they're increasingly authoritarian. So that's the whole point. I don't need to be popular. I just need to rule like an authoritarian. But the political juggernaut of Trump, the guy no Republican would ever dare to cross, that version of Donald Trump is quickly fading. And when you start to see Republicans slapping down their own president, I saw a thread yesterday. In fact, let me see if I can pull it up on the conservative subreddit are conservative. It was like a what is going on with Trump kind of thing. There are a bunch of posts even right now where you look at it at the comment.

And Trump has lost our conservative. There are times to just shut up. This was one of them. Another comment. I find myself defending Trump a lot on this website, but not this time. This was in very poor taste. Another. His comments were completely unnecessary.

Another. Oh, my God. What a stupid thing to say. Another. Yeah, shit like this literally does no good. A president should never act like this. Another. Such an unpresidential statement.

Thousands of these are conservative. The conservative subreddit mostly defends everything Trump does. So there is a crack here. And something seems different. We're going to see how far it goes. Donald Trump may soon be forced to hand over his medical and psychological records along with years of tax and financial documents. And this time, it's not because of a leak.

It's not because of a whistleblower. It is because Trump is the one suing someone. buddy. Here's the story. In a defamation lawsuit that Trump filed against the Pulitzer Prize board, the defendants are now demanding discovery. They want Trump's medical records. They want Trump's prescription history, his tax returns. This goes back to 2022 when Trump sued the Pulitzer board over awards that they gave the New York Times in Washington Post for their reporting about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Now, Trump lost his mind over this and he says, It was all based on false reporting.

They should revoke it. Awards. Give me a break. The Pulitzer board reviewed the reporting. They said the reporting is accurate, can't be discredited. And now as part of defending themselves, they are saying we need documents from Trump, which could undermine his claims. So they are asking as part of discovery for all of Trump's tax returns dating back to

2015. Records showing income sources and financial holdings. Trump's liabilities. Trump's medical records. Trump's psychological health records. if they exist. A prescription medication history. Trump reportedly has 30 days to respond. And this is where things start to get a little uncomfortable for Donald Trump. He is aggressively insisted for years. He's in perfect health. He's acing brain injury tests all the time. And if anybody asks about his fitness,

he melts down. Just last week, Trump flipped out on truth social saying, if you question my health, It could be treason. It could be sedition. That's not a normal response from a sitting president who was being transparent about his health and has nothing to hide. And at the same time, every public appearance for Donald Trump fuel speculation. The bandages on the hands. The makeup on the hands.

The swollen hands. The swollen ankles. The confusion falling asleep six times in 10 days in public. Drifting off mid-sentence. All of this stuff. And it's been forcing the White House press secretary Caroline Levitt to make increasingly unbelievable defenses of what's going on. That's the health side. Now, then we have all of the financial side. I know that we're a decade in. I would still love to see Trump's financial records, his tax returns.

Is he as wealthy as he claims to be? What are resources of income, et cetera? I don't know if we will. The big point here is that Trump brought this on himself. He chose to sue. When you sue, you don't get to selectively hide the evidence that might hurt your case. It's called discovery. Trump's lawyers said the lawsuit is about correcting the record, this case could end up correcting the record about Trump. We might finally get a picture of the medical record, the financial record, and the psychological record. Now, as usual, Trump is going to say, oh, it's fake news. This is to go away. They're going after me improperly all of this stuff. But this is how discovery works. And some of you may remember there was this incident where I received a legal threat letter

after we published an interview. I did an interview with someone who was critical of an elected official. The elected official got their high-priced law firm to send me a letter saying, we're going to sue you into the ground, millions, this, that. You've got to apologize. You've got to do this, that, the other thing. And in conversations with lawyers, I was advised, listen, if we fight this, they will probably buckle because especially if what was said on your show is true by your guest,

they are not going to want discovery because discovery means now we can depose them and get them on record about the claims that were made. And every lawyer said they're going to run scared of that. You could probably prevail if you fight this. But, but you might accumulate six figure legal fees in doing it. And you would only get those legal fees back in very particular cases. And of course, especially at the time, the show was very small, we really couldn't Couldn't do that. We couldn't afford that. But this is a similar situation as to what's going on with

Trump. Trump did sue. And now he is potentially going to be hit with the unfortunate reality of discovery. Now, let me add some realism here. Even if Trump hands over the medical records, it raises an obvious question, which is what will that actually prove? Because this is a guy whose own doctors have publicly claimed he's the healthiest American president ever. I can only assume that if the doctors are willing to say that out loud, why would the underlying records say something different? It is unlikely that if Trump's doctors for a long time have said these outrageously unbelievable things about his health in public, that they probably, I'm just guessing here,

but they probably either have medical records that make no reference to whatever Trump is dealing with health-wise or are equally hyperbolic and propagandistic. So it's sort of like Trump's tax filings, which have long been about obfuscation, not transparent, I would assume at this point, Trump has doctored the medical records such that they've been curated, they've been lawyered, they've been written with the with the understanding that someday these may become public. In other words, disclosure doesn't automatically mean that we get the truth. And so it's very interesting.

This is potentially a major backfire for Trump. But I wouldn't be holding my breath is the point I'm trying to make. A pending Supreme Court case could strip our Fourth Amendment rights and allow immigration agents to come into our homes for any reason, no probable cause needed. All while Republicans try to twist things so that you think this is all great for America. This should be the biggest story in the U.S. right now, but it's almost impossible to keep up with the millions of moves that Trump is making every single day. That's why ground news exists.

Ground News is an app and website that exposes the blind spots and spin before it takes control of our opinions. Ground News is the smarter, more reliable way to stay informed when MAGA is banking on us getting distracted. I'm partnering up with Ground News to give you 40% off the same vantage plan that I use. So you'll pay only five bucks a month for all of their premium features. Just go to ground. news slash Pacman or use the code Pacman in the app when you sign up. The link is in the description

or scan the QR code. All right. Let's talk about economic incompetence. There are real consequences to having incompetent propagandists in charge of important economic functions and areas of this massive, massive American economy. Where we are going to start here is the idea of 20% GD growth or 25% GDP growth. Trump's tool, Kevin Hassett, has now mentioned this a couple of times. Carl Kintania on CNBC asked him about it this morning. Trump and others have been saying, why can't we have 25% GDP? Let's listen to what Kevin Hassett says and then we're going to really dive into economic

growth as a concept. The Commerce Secretary has been on with us lately suggesting maybe 6% GDP. and 26. The president the other day in a meeting said, why can't there be 20% or 25% GDP growth? What is the street supposed to do with that kind of number? You know, as an abstract thought, I don't know what the highest growth ever is, but I doubt it made it to 20%. The bottom line is that if you go bottom up and you say, what's productivity growth right now? I think because of AI, it's maybe two and a half to three percent. What's capital stock growth right now?

It's probably around 1%. What are we getting out of labor? It's probably around half a percent to 1%. So you're looking at the sort of supply side of GDP going into next year telling us that we need to have a number of this north of four. And so that that's about as far as I think that I'm willing to go. All right. So listen, let let, I want to dig into this whole like massive. Why can't we have massive GDP growth?

Trump doesn't get it and Kevin Hassett isn't saying it is impossible for an economy like that of the United States. what he should really be saying. But instead, because he's under the thumb of Trump, he plays coy, he goes, listen, I'm thinking about more than four. I'm not sure what the most GDP growth ever has been. I can't believe that we have to talk about this, but hopefully we've before I've talked about like, why is two to three percent inflation good?

And a lot of people write in and they go, that's really useful. I never thought about that. I didn't understand that. Let's talk about this. GDP growth is in the United States, two to three percent. would be sort of like normal for a country like the United States, five to six percent GDP growth would be like very strong. And usually you only see that after a recession. And then you have these 20 to 25 percent GDP growth numbers that Trump has been waxing poetic about, which would only

ever happen if something has gone very, very wrong. Or somebody doesn't know what they're talking about. The problem with the idea of GDP growth that big is that big, is that big, countries like the United States, by definition, grow more slowly. A poor country can grow faster because they're catching up. And improvements to infrastructure, for example, can provide massive GDP boost because they were starting from a point that was so diminished. If a country has terrible roads, terrible infrastructure, and really low productivity, building basics that those in wealthy, rich countries take for granted can give you

can give you a huge jump in GDP. If all of a sudden you bring a highway to a company, to a company to a country that has crappy dirt roads, that is going to provide such an infrastructure boost that you could have large GDP growth. But in the United States, even though, you know, our trains are terrible. We still for the most part have what's considered advanced infrastructure. We already have high productivity. We already have a massive consumer economy. So there isn't any easy growth left to be eeked out. And this is why the U.S. economy mostly grows 2 to 3%. Germany grows 1 to 2%.

Japan grows, you know, even a little more slowly than that. It's considered normal. 25% GDP growth in a year would be like adding a major economy, right? 25% of the American GDP would be like $7 trillion. That's like adding Germany and France in a year to the United States. And that would require tens of millions. of new jobs instantly, where are they going to come from? It would require massive factory construction overnight, the sort of factory construction that can take five to seven years. And it would

require explosive productivity gains with no inflation whatsoever. Normally, if you have massive productivity gains that actually that that generates some inflation as well. It has never happened, ever in a modern, stable economy. Now, you will sometimes see 20% numbers. It's usually fake growth. What I mean by that is country collapses 25%, then rebounds 20%. Didn't really grow 20% from where it started. It's just that there was a decline and a partial recovery. In fact, we have an example of that.

If you go back to COVID, if you go back to 2020 in the United States, which was sort of like the extenuating circumstance of all extenuating circumstances, in Q3 of 2020, annualized GDP growth with was 34%. But it wasn't really because Q1 of 2020 GDP was down 5%. Q2 of 2020 GDP was down 28%. And so that 34% GDP growth annualized from Q3 of 2020 was really just recovering what the COVID shutdowns led to. Sometimes hyperinflation will distort numbers. You could have nominal massive GDP growth, but it's. It doesn't really represent more productivity. It's that there was such inflation that everything just costs more and in nominal numbers.

You're like, oh, we had way higher GDP, but you didn't really. So the point is the US isn't in any of those situations if the United States ever posted 25% GDP growth, not after losing 25% GDP the previous quarter. It wouldn't be something to celebrate. It would be what the hell broke here. What went so wrong? Is it the number? Is it that we had some insane situation the previous?

previous quarter, what was it? I would love it if Kevin Hassett just went. Trump's wrong. Of course, it's a pipe dream. Nobody ever does that to Donald Trump if they work for Donald Trump unless they want to be fired tomorrow. But 20% GDP growth, 25% GDP growth, it would be the responsible thing to do to say to Donald Trump. You got to stop talking about that. It doesn't make any sense. It makes you sound silly. What would represent a significant amount of growth for the United States would be somewhere in the range of four to five percent. And, That would be really extraordinary and something to potentially hang your hat on. Don't keep talking about 20% GDP.

All right. I have something different for you today. If you like this, let me know. Okay, leave a comment, hit the subscribe button. Let me set this up for you. Dr. Mike is a primary medicine doctor. He has a YouTube channel. He's a content creator.

He is science based and evidence based. There's another guy, Dr. Daniel Aymann, who is a. psychiatrist, he sells supplements, and he also does something called spec scanning of people's brains, which looks at brain activity. Okay. He famously did such a scan of Kim Kardashian and found that she had lower activity. Sometimes he refers to it as lower flow in her frontal lobes. Now, you might say, so what?

What does that mean? What's the normal range of activity? What are the implications of that? What is the baseline of frontal lobe activity if we just scan random people in the population who have no complaint or those are all good questions. Those are not questions that we necessarily got answered in this clip. But Dr. Mike brought on Dr. Amen to talk to him. I don't know if Dr. Amon was unprepared, but it did not go well for him.

And this is a true clinic in beating back disinformation. I have a ton to say about this. But let's just start. And then I think you'll quickly kind of get a sense for what is going on here. Kim Kardashian recently got some imaging done, and you found some results on her. Tell me about that. She had sleepy frontal lobes. What does that mean? So spec is a study of relative blood flow. It looks at activity. She had less activity in the front third of her brain, which means it's going to go with things like forethought and judgment and impulse. Okay. So he says she had lower activity and blood flow, which is it, in her frontal lobes. This goes to

impulse and and forethought and this sort of stuff. This is all basically nonsense. Speck measures relative blood flow, not cognition. It, uh, there, we, we do not have evidence that reduced blood flow maps cleanly onto traits like forethought and impulse control and judgment. So the first question we should be asking is, have we compared people with high and low blood flow in that area to tests that assess cognition? And have we determined that there is a correlation?

Forget about a causation. Is there even a correlation? And the way you would start to explore that is you would say, okay, Kim Kardashian has what I describe as low flow in her frontal lobes. Let's get a thousand random people test their frontal lobe flow and then give them some kind of real cognitive test. Let's assess them in a number of different ways. Maybe you do neuropsych eval in an IQ test and whatever.

And let's see if it's even correlated because I don't know how many of you. you know about sort of the history of back pain, but there are lots of scenarios. It used to it used to be the case more. Hopefully now they're getting better at this where you would say, I've got back pain. You go to the doctor. They say, let's get an MRI. You get an MRI of your back. They find some irregularity in your back. And they say, well, you've got this irregularity. This is the cause of the back pain. Let's operate. You operate. The back pain's no better. And what we determined was that if you go out and you take random people in the population who have no back pain complaint and you give them an MRI, a lot of

of them have irregularities in their spine some you know mild degeneration or whatever the case may be but they don't have symptoms and then you have to go and say ah that doesn't necessarily finding that on an MRI doesn't necessarily mean it's the cause of the symptom or of the pain anyway so let's listen to to dr mike handle some of this pulse control and focus she wanted to be better why doesn't every family medicine doctor why does the american psychiatric association an American Academy of Neurology. Why are they against this imaging? It doesn't fit the paradigm.

Well, I'm reading the largest agencies that represent neurologists, psychiatrists. It's like me saying something fully against the American Academy Family Physicians without evidence to say why I'm disagreeing with them. So Dr. Amon says, though the reason that this test, this scan, isn't being recommended by the APA and the AAN, is because it doesn't fit their paradigm. The truth is that this scan is not suggested because it has very low specificity. It has poor reproducibility, meaning if you just even do the scan an hour later, Kim Kardashian's results might have been significantly different.

And there is no proven impact on outcomes. The idea being if you identify low flow, it doesn't seem to be correlated with any particular outcome. Then they get into the topic of studies. I have 90 studies that I have published and I have the world's largest database. And I actually don't know what the point of us arguing about it is I have more experience in this than anybody probably in the history of the world. Having 90 studies that he authored, quantity isn't quality, number one, these papers that Daniel Aiman has put together about this frontal lobe spec flow stuff. They're observational. They're not blinded. They're not randomized. They're conducted at his own clinics. But when you look at what independent

reviews have criticized him for, they say it is not scientifically founded and clinically justified based on the data that we have. They then bring up the topic of randomized controlled trials, the gold standard. And here's what it said. And if you don't look, you don't know. But do we have the randomized control data to be able to back these things up? Give me an example and I'll tell you what the research is. Is there randomized control data on spec scans and their efficacy in a specific mental health

condition? Yes. Which one? Well, which one do you want to talk about? Anyone. I mean, if you go on PubMed. Well, can you name one right now? Gov today.

You're the leading experts. I'm a family vet. I don't know. Distinguishing post-traumatic stress disorder from traumatic brain injury. That's not a randomized control. Now understand what he just did. Distinguishing two conditions based on imaging. That is very different than saying when we find low flow in the frontal lobes, it is correlated

with certain cognitive traits. And therefore, we know that this is a specific enough test to give us out. actionable information. He's just like, oh, there's PubMed on distinguishing traumatic brain injury from PTSD in the brain. Okay, but what does that have to do with what we're looking at here? Study. I'm sorry? That's not a randomized controlled study. We're talking imaging. Yeah. This is not a pharmaceutical intervention where we're going to do a randomized. Well, the goal of doing the imaging is to create more customizable treatments, as you said. And if you have customizable treatments, your outcomes should be better. That's the randomized controlled

study. And our outcomes are better. We published a study on 500 outcomes. Randomized control data is really important. What don't you say to develop a causal relationship? I'm sorry. Say this again. Randomize controlled trial. All right. This is basically the whole thing. Now, I'm going to kind of give you the cheat sheet. You go to Daniel Amon's website and you really very quickly figure out what this seems to really be about. Okay. which is that he has supplements for all of this stuff. Okay. You go to his website and he's got a brain and body power max and the neurovite plus

multivitamin and he's got brain and body power. And you just go into any one of these and you start looking at the ingredients that they contain and you start checking each one of these sets of ingredients against what is known in their use for any particular. condition and you very quickly realize that this all seems to kind of be nonsense. Now, I think it would be very interesting if we were able to design a study, which could be done, which is you say, hey, you know what we're going to do? We are going to rant, like I said earlier, we're going to take a thousand people. We're going to scan their frontal lobe activity. We are then going to give them

tests to see if what we observe in a scan correlates with any kind of brain function. Does it affect are there mood related things? Cognition, memory, anything. And then if we find that there is a relationship, we could then do another randomized controlled trial where we give people, what is this stuff? Phosphatidyl serine and acetyl al-carnatine and alpha lipoic acid and co-enzyme Q10. And then it'll be totally randomized and blinded. And we will see whether then when we retest people after they have been given either either a placebo or this stuff.

whether it makes any difference. That's what Dr. Mike is talking about. But Dr. Amon would rather have celebrities show up, get a scan and say you've got low blood, low flow in the frontal lobes. And then for 145 bucks a month or whatever, I've got supplements I can sell you, which might help with some of this stuff. Really nice job by Dr. Mike. I think we need way more of this. We've got a phenomenal bonus show for you today. We will talk fentanyl. We will talk the BBC being sued by Trump for $10 billion. And we will talk about a meeting between Erica Kirk and Candice Owens. Can you imagine?

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