The David Pakman Show - THIS is why Karoline ditched Trump

Episode Date: October 11, 2026

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Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. Hey, everybody, welcome to the bonus show. What you're hearing right now is a free sneak peek of our paywalled content, which our paid members get five times a week. If you want the extra coverage in your feed every day, go over to join.

Join Pacman.com and join the community. Welcome to the bonus show. It's great to be back in the studio. Caroline Levitt has the most unsurprising new job I could ever have imagined, which is that she is going to be a contributor to Fox News channel. This is at this point. I mean, like, of course she is. Kaylee McEnany became one and now she has her own show after being Trump's press secretary.

This seems like the natural thing. In fact, I don't even think the interesting thing, Pat, is that she got this job. What I am most curious about is do they know, expect or believe that this is their path when they first take the administration job to begin with? Like, is it almost like an unofficial retirement plan when you get such a job? Absolutely. It's a revolving door. And it's been going on for years and years before Kaylee McEnany did it.

Dana Perino did it. And we're also seeing it on the Democratic sign side. Jen Sacky now works for MS now and has a show there. So I think that is a natural career path for these people. They expect to not make a tremendous amount while they work in government, but then they know that afterwards, after the administration's over or even if they want to leave early, they can transition into media and get a high paying roll over there. The only sort of interesting question to me is, you know, there is a little bit of drama

between Trump and Fox now. There are more moments like yesterday morning when Trump was complaining that Fox and Friends wasn't covering his rally from the previous night or when he doesn't like their polling, even though their polling is done by a different agency. I wonder if that has the potential to put Caroline Leavitt in a weird position. I mean, it'd be interesting. Could Trump treat this as Fox News poaching his talent? Because we already know that Trump was not happy with Caroline Levitt's decision to leave the administration to take care of her two young kids. Right. You know that because Trump keeps saying these vindictive things about it, about how she seems to love her kids more than him.

And he just obviously wasn't happy with the decision. So for her now to immediately, after leaving the administration because she was too busy with her personal life, going to Fox News a month later, I don't know how Trump's going to take that. Yeah, I don't know either. And Trump seems pretty tied up with a bunch of different crap right now. But I think it has the potential, the potential to get really wacky and interesting. I also like, I'm guessing Caroline Levitt will. be part of Fox's election night coverage. You know, I know that she's not there to pretend to be

unbiased, but like it just all, it seems so fresh that she was working for Trump that it seems particularly wacky. Well, yeah, especially because Fox News just cans Maria Bardoomo because she apparently crossed this ethical boundary in telling the Trump administration about Fox News policy. So that apparently is not allowed, but transitioning from being the White House press secretary to working as a contributor on Fox News in a month's time, that's apparently acceptable. Very odd. It's all very odd, different standards. It's all crazy. But I don't think anybody will be shocked. Caroline Levitt going and now working at Fox News. California has made history. Taxing ICE detention centers. This is interesting. California has a new law, AB 1633,

And it puts a 25% tax on private ICE detention operators. This is something that they will immediately challenge in court. This would be on gross receipts. Now, there's a reason that is very interesting, Pat. If it was just on profit, there are so many ways to artificially make your profit look low. And the fact that this is specifically on gross receipts is sort of a clever little detail that is included in the bill. Absolutely. And they wanted to make it a 50% tax that eventually went down to 25%. And I think the point is to make it so that these private prisons can't operate because if they have to pay even the 25% gross tax, then it's just not going to be worth it for them to do business in California. Yeah. And one of the things that I think is relevant here is that the whole point, you know, there was this debate. I talked about this a lot on the fifth column at podcast that I did, which I think was a really good one. There was this moment where there was all this talk of.

of like abolished prisons from a very small fringe element of the left. It was not, it was even less popular, I would say Pat, than defund the police, which was not particularly popular. It was this whole abolished prisons thing. And then as sort of like common sense arrived, even some of the abolished prisons people sort of were like, what we really are talking about is abolished private prisons. And I think that that is a worthy goal. And the idea here seems to be a sort of.

sort of backdoor way to get the private prisons to say, we just can't really do it financially and kind of tax them out of being in California, which if that's the goal, like, I respect these backdoor ways of trying to achieve some of these worthwhile goals. Well, yeah, I mean, I think you can get a lot of people behind the idea that abolishing prisons outright is a bad idea, but abolishing private prisons, that's actually a good idea because there shouldn't be an incentive for these private prisons to go out and make money. And how they do that is they take the allocation that they get from the state and try to squeeze as much as they can out of it.

How do you do that? You limit the services and things that you provide at the prisons for people. So it's a terrible thing that we have in the first place that shouldn't exist. And you may even wonder why they exist in places like California to begin with. A lot of these progressive states have tried to abolish private prisons outright, but they do so much business with the federal government that the federal government is able to keep them open and also pressure states to some degree, too, to keep them open because they do have that supremacy power over them.

Yeah. So that's why they're able to continue existing in places even like California. The other thing that is sometimes part of the contracts with private prisons is the private prison company, like geo group or core civic or whoever, they'll go, yeah, listen, we'll run the prison, but we need an occupancy guarantee, meaning even if the prison's 60% for full, we want you to pay us as if it were 98% full. So not only are they cutting all corners in terms of, you know, providing even a decent place to be that that's like mildly acceptable based on basic human rights. They also say no matter how full it is, if we're going to go through the trouble of running this thing, we want you to pay us as if it were 98% full all the time,

which also arguably makes it more expensive for the government. Now, the government would argue even paying for 98% capacity when it's not at 98% capacity is cheaper. than running it ourselves. I don't know the answer to that. I'd have to see whether that's true. But all of the incentives here are completely and totally backwards. Right. Well, the reason that private prisons today fill a hole in the market is that it's often really difficult to get the legislation passed through the government to build a new prison or to make sure that we have the resources for, you know, this sort of thing in the first place because we see it, we see it all the time with these processes being really slowly rolled out.

And just it's often difficult to get the public's, the public support around building a prison. So if you have the private prison already constructed and you can say, all right, well, we'll just contract this out and the government can use this existing facility. It's a lot easier for them to go about doing that. You know the other one that's also going on. I just, let me actually see if I can find an article so I can be not just spitballing here. Let me see here. This is wacky. What I've read is happening. Let me find the name. example. Yes. Okay. A bunch just in July this happened. The new one that's going on in some of these private facilities is the private prison company will sell the prison to the government for crazy

amount of money. For example, two facilities that process immigrants in California just in July were sold to the government for $1.5 billion. Okay. So government in this case gives core civic one of the biggest private prisons. They give them 1.5 billion. But then they hire them to run it. And so the private prison company builds the facility, sells it for this massive cash windfall, and then gets a contract to run it as well. And so they're profiting on all sides. And it's just a crazy thing that's going on. It sounds like a very profitable business model. I guess the only downside is that there are a lot of people against it. But even with all the people against it, they still are able to function. And when you have the federal government working with them hand in hands to,

for example, how's these detainees, then they're going to continue going for the perceivable future. That's exactly right. All right. So that is the deal. We will, it is immediately being challenged, by the way, in court as unconstitutional. By the way, the basis on which it's being challenged is it interferes with the federal government's mandate that they deal with immigration. And it's like, you know, this is pretty indirect. Like the federal government doesn't have to have private prisons running this. They don't have to have them in California. They don't have to give them no special tax. Like, it's, you're jumping like three steps to taxing the gross receipts in California violates the federal government sole authority over immigration. But we'll see what courts say.

They're going to challenge it. Well, I've also seen that there's this argument that says that the federal government has, well, first of all, the supremacy power, but states can't get involved in the decisions that the federal government wants to make when it comes to contracting. So if they decided to do this 25% tax, some could argue, then that's an undue burden on the contractors working with the federal government. And so the federal government has every right to shut that down. California's response to that is saying that this is going to apply to all private prisons in the state, not just the ones working with the federal government, but also the state and local governments as well. So we'll see if that holds up. But I think that there is a high chance that this gets struck down. We will say, I agree with you.

I agree with you. We will see that is what was passed in California and we will see where it goes. Donald Trump gave out Senator Tom Cotton's cell phone number and Senator John Kennedy, a Republican. He is not part of the Democrat, mostly Democratic Kennedy family. He said that it should not have been done, that Trump should not have given out Tom Cotton's cell phone number, which is like, of course that's the case. That is a very bad thing to do. Now, the reason Trump did this as Trump was attacking Cotton over his opposition to the Sunshine Protection Act bill, which would make daylight saving time permanent. Trump doesn't like that.

And he posted call Tom on his cell phone. And he essentially doxed Tom Cotton. This is so beyond the pale pat. I know that we are in this environment where it's like we've been totally desensitized. We expect anything, you know, all this stuff. This is completely and utterly an insane thing for the president to do. Absolutely. And it's not Trump's first time doing it.

He also did it to Lindsey Graham back during the 2016 campaign. So this is just one of Trump's tactics. It's clearly bullying in some way, right? I mean, it's doxing at the very least. It's harassment, obviously. Yep. And it's surprising, not surprising that he was willing to do this to Tom Cotton, a Republican senator, over an issue that is not going to make or break his presidency.

Like, this wasn't over the big, beautiful bill or some other piece of signature legislation that Trump wants to pass. It's over the Sunshine Protection Act, which, you know, something that I hope ultimately does get passed. But it's not the type of thing that you leak someone or not even leak. You send out someone's cell phone number over. It just doesn't seem to be that big of an issue, especially to someone in your own party. Completely. And the other thing I think is important with this with all of these little bills. Trump sees this sort of thing as it's always just about personal loyalty and personalities. But sometimes like, you know, We've gone back and forth about this permanent daylight saving time thing.

Sometimes the way to get things done isn't by threatening or bullying individuals. Like sometimes you actually do have to build consensus rather than bully people. And I don't think Trump likes that. And I don't think he's used to it from his time primarily in the real estate world. Well, Trump thinks that loyalty only goes one way. So he expects loyalty from everyone else. But he doesn't think that he has to be loyal to them. And it's not like he's even breaking loyalty over.

like I said before, a significant issue. This is over such trivial things, right? So not to say it's not an important issue, but it's not the type of thing that's at the top of the legislative agenda, right? And it's not going to be a big issue in the midterms, for example. So the fact that Trump was willing to do this over such a small issue, to me, it really speaks volumes about Trump's character, let's say. I think that that is a way to put it very likely that a lot of Trump's actions directly speak to, to his character. I want to say thank you to people. who came out to my event in Springfield, Massachusetts with Jessica Tarlov. This included, I believe the people who came from the furthest away were a couple drove in from Buffalo, New York, all the way to Springfield,

Massachusetts, which has got to be about seven or eight hours. And then also someone else came in from Delaware, which must be similar. I don't know which is further away. We could look it up. But incredible, Pat, that people are driving in for these events. Did you do like a contest asking who traveled the farthest to go to this event? No, not specific. Or raising the hands. Who traveled further than this place? Who traveled further than that place?

No, no, no. We didn't turn the show into that. But when people were coming through the signing line, to some, I would say, hey, where are you in from? And someone's at Buffalo, New York. And I said, wow, that's so far. And then someone else heard that and said, I came in from Delaware. So it's not about a competition, but it was a very powerful event. Yeah, that second person chiming in to say.

I came here from Delaware. I wonder if they were trying to get into a competition because that's what it sounds like to me. It did seem like it. It did seem like it. But we signed a lot of books. We had a great conversation. And overall, it was a great event. I don't have any other events to announce right now, but we're looking at doing some more.

Maybe we did one in New York. Maybe we'll do another New York one, possibly a Boston one, maybe something in DC. So we will continue to talk about it. And at some point, maybe on the West Coast, you never know. It would be nice to do something. We could get a stage. We could fill the stage if I did an event. It would be me, Brian Tyler Cohen, Brian Cohen, Brian Tyler, Tyler, Tyler Bryanson.

It could be like 10 people up on the stage. And I think people would pay double for that. We could even ask Daniel Carter. I don't know what is speaking. Yeah, we'll have to ask about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He may have been destroyed. He might have been destroyed at the programmatic level.

His code was deleted. You just couldn't make it in this business. It didn't make. You really can't. You really can't do it. All right. I will see everybody tomorrow. New show, new bonus show.

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