The David Pakman Show - Trump gets brutal economic news as supporters invoke Jesus

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

On the Show: -- The United States adds only 29,000 jobs in September, falling far short of the 90,000 forecasted by economists -- Donald Trump boasts about his ability to climb stairs and attacks Te...xas Democrat James Talarico for being vegan -- Donald Trump supporters in Oklahoma claim religious persecution while pairing Donald Trump with Jesus in a viral video -- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth prepares a plan to eliminate 20% of senior general and admiral positions in the United States military -- Donald Trump boasts about his personal friendship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un despite obtaining no nuclear concessions -- Pete Buttigieg urges Democratic voters to turn out in massive numbers to prevent post-election legal challenges from Donald Trump -- Karl Rove denounces political activist Nick Fuentes and Texas candidate Bo French for bringing bigotry into the Republican Party -- The Friday Feedback segment -- On the Bonus Show: Trump confronted on Iran, the economy, and AI in a TIME Magazine interview, and much more... 💳 PDS Debt: Get your free assessment & find the best option for you at https://pdsdebt.com/pakman 🩳 SHEATH Underwear: Code PAKMAN for 20% OFF at https://sheathunderwear.com/pakman 💡 Outskill: Grab your free seat to the 2-Day AI Mastermind at https://link.outskill.com/PAKMANDEC1 ⚠️ Ground News: Get 40% OFF their unlimited access Vantage plan at https://ground.news/pakman 💻 Try Aura free for 14 days at https://aura.com/pakman 🔬 Freedom From Religion Foundation: Text DAVID to 511511 or go to https://ffrf.us/david -- Become a Member: https://davidpakman.com/membership -- Subscribe to our (FREE) Substack newsletter: https://davidpakman.substack.com -- Get David's Book: https://bit.ly/m/attention -- Send David a text: +1 (646) 531-4333 -- 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 (01:14) September jobs report misses expectations (08:25) Trump rambles during campaign speeches (15:49) Survey tracks Christian nationalist ideology (26:06) Pentagon plans cuts to top military generals (34:43) Donald Trump praises dictator Kim Jong Un (43:29) Democrats urged to win by large margins (50:23) Karl Rove criticizes Republican extremism (59:47) Friday Feedback segment Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Well, really bad economic news today that we will talk about a very, very poor jobs report. Strategically, it's very bad timing for Republicans. And even Fox Business admitted these numbers look very bad. Trump hitting the rally stage where is he helping candidates or is he hurting candidates? He confused nuclear facilities with drug factories. He bragged about walking upstairs. The crowd wasn't super impressed. And he talked about Tala Rico being vagin.
Starting point is 00:00:31 I know. You're like, is it vegan? He said he's vegan. We will hear from some Trump supporters at one of these rallies. It is terrifying Christian nationalism. We will hear waxing poetic about dictators. And Carl Rove, one of the architects of the Iraq war, is now saying that the party he helped build has been taken over by bigots, including some Nazis.
Starting point is 00:00:52 But he's not actually looking inward when he tries to figure out how did this all. happen. All of that and your emails and comments and feedback and trolling and questions. No, we'll try to keep it positive. Stand by. The Trump administration received devastating economic news today. Maybe the worst moment possible. We have the final jobs report before the midterm elections and it's bad. There's really no other way to say it. The United States added only 29,000 jobs in September. The expectation from economists was 90,000. The number of jobs added coming in two thirds lower, 67% lower than the expectation. This is not a small miss. Unemployment also ticking up from 4.1% to 4.2%.
Starting point is 00:01:49 And you don't have to take my word for it. You don't have to take nasty liberal MS now's word for it. Here is the Fox business report on this. They are trying to process these numbers in real time. How could this be? And because she was fired, they no longer have Maria Bartaromo to spin the numbers as to how they're actually good. So here is Fox Business getting the bad news. Yeah, the numbers do not look good. I'm looking at 29,000 jobs were added. That is well below expectations for 90,000. And our unemployment rate jumps up to 4.2% from 4.1% the previous month.
Starting point is 00:02:30 So remember, a significant slowdown again on some of these numbers that we're seeing in September. Just 29,000. Last month, August was 162, and we were expecting 90. And again, that in part helps the unemployment rate jump up to 4-2 from a 4-1 in the previous month. Your early thoughts? Well, you know, again, looking at this through two lenses. One lens is, hey, the market is like, oh, boy, just a couple of days ago. maybe 48 hours, 72 hours, an October rate hike was on the table. Yeah, you're right.
Starting point is 00:03:05 Not anymore. Not anymore, right? So understand the argument that's being made there, which is, hey, this is actually good for the markets because the markets don't want more rate hikes. If the jobs numbers were good, that would be inflationary because it means more people now have jobs, meaning they can afford to buy stuff, meaning that'll push inflation up. We will then do a rate hike to try to cool the economy to push inflation back down. That didn't happen because the jobs numbers aren't
Starting point is 00:03:36 good. This would be reason for the Fed next month to say we won't raise rates. We'll keep them level. That's the internal logic of it. If you're sort of like, David, what the hell are you talking about? The important thing here is they are trying to spin a bad jobs number to make it look better. That's the fundamental core of it. And when Maria Bartaromo was on this show, she would find some way to explain to you why this is some kind of Trump engineered miracle, but she was fired. And there are disputes as to whether she was fired, although Axios reported it was confirmed that she was fired because she leaked an internal Fox memo to the Trump administration. So instead, we have Charles Payne. And Charles Payne looks and sounds like someone who was just told
Starting point is 00:04:19 Christmas is canceled. But I'm seeing some maybe weakness in average earnings. Charles, I know that you were hot on this, month over month average earnings 0.13% versus the 0.3 and earnings year of year of year three instead of the three two expectations. So sort of the earnings may be coming down. Yeah. Or the rate of growth is slow. Oh, Charles is despondent dramatically. Yeah. And that's just that that exacerbates this inflationary situation because you know you go and the gasoline is up but the rate of growth to your wages and not. And again, it's nuanced. Lower and middle have been doing very well this year. But, you know, it gets back again to policy. Earlier this week, New York Fed chair,
Starting point is 00:05:03 President William said that they were early, that they shouldn't have gone. He suggested that and they shouldn't go anymore, to your point. And this just cements that, you know, let the economy grow. There'll be some fits, false starts. But you can see, we've got the bond yield, the 10-year on the screen. All right. So there is Charles Payne. So here's the, here's a couple things. Number one. We're kind of joking about this. I want the economy to do well. I want more people to have jobs if that's what they want. I want people to be paid reasonable, livable wages, all of that stuff.
Starting point is 00:05:32 What's funny is how there is this persistent effort to spin the numbers. And I don't even think that the 29,000 is the worst part of the report. Like if you actually dig deeper into the report and you look at previous numbers that were updated, previous numbers have also been revised down. August was reported at 162,000 jobs. That was revised down to 133. So that's 29,000 jobs gone there. July was reported as a gain. The revisions show we lost jobs in July.
Starting point is 00:06:05 So we are minus 10K in July, 133 in August, 29 in September. Those are really low numbers, especially when you look historically at what job creation tends to be under Democratic presidents. Now, I always caution against pretending one jobs report or even three tell you everything about the economy. Layoffs remain low. That's good. Unemployment, 4.2 is higher than 4.1, but it's still quite low. Are there seasonal explanations for the low September number associated with the Labor Day holiday coming late in September?
Starting point is 00:06:41 Like, all that stuff is totally possible. But the political timing is brutal. And when we are now up against voting. and Trump has spent two years saying to Americans, everything is great. And he has spent even longer saying that the president owns every economic number. When Biden was president, every gallon of gas was Biden's fault. Every grocery bill was Biden's fault. All of it was proof of Biden's destruction of the economy.
Starting point is 00:07:08 If those are the rules, you live by them, you die by them. And we are heading towards midterms with voters very unhappy on cost of living. mortgage rates are just sky high, record diesel prices, and now you've got a jobs report that came in at one third of what was expected. And the uncomfortable irony is markets went up after this report. And it is not because investors thought 29,000 jobs was great. It's because the number, as I mentioned earlier, makes investors more optimistic that the Fed won't raise rates and think about that. The economic news was so weak that Wall Street's reaction was, this is so terrible. It will stop the Fed from making borrowing even more expensive, which we like.
Starting point is 00:07:58 That's the economic picture that Trump now has to explain to voters with basically a month until election day, 29,000 jobs, unemployment ticking up, 60K erased from the last two months through revisions. And even Fox looks at it and goes, hey, these numbers don't look good. We completely agree. The question now is what political effect is this going to have? And Trump is worried because he's out there doing rallies. If Donald Trump were confident that Republicans weren't going to get crushed in four weeks, he wouldn't be out there doing multiple dementia rallies in the same day.
Starting point is 00:08:35 Donald Trump going to multiple states yesterday under the guise of helping Republicans. It's not clear that this is helping anybody with Donald Trump's. lack of cognitive ability and sort of bragging about walking made people say, hey, I don't know that you're really helping anybody. Here is Donald Trump on the midnight hammer strikes on Iran talking about how every single bomb was unloaded. But then he's talking about nuclear and drugs. And I can't tell. Is he talking about nuclear power drug factories or drug-fueled nuclear plants? I can't tell. See if you can make heads or tails out of this utter and sense. sanity.
Starting point is 00:09:16 37 hours, they were refueling up there. We have the greatest tankers. We have the greatest military of the world. They went from Missouri. And then at 1 o'clock in the morning with no moon dark as can be, these unbelievable machines led by the most incredible pilots in the world. They unloaded every single bomb, went right down airshoots into this drug factories, really. That's what they were doing.
Starting point is 00:09:45 They were nuclear and drug. They were doing drugs, but they were doing the- So Trump's confused now. He's trying to weave his way out of it. Nuclear, but these drug factories slash nuclear factories were hit so hard. Those things, you know, granite mountains, granite strong, went right down the air shoots. I don't think they'll be building too many air shoots from now on, I could tell you. 37 hours, they were refueling up there.
Starting point is 00:10:08 We have the great- What is he talking about? What on earth is he talking about? We sent all of our bombs and they were really drug factories, but nuclear. I can't tell if this is a place where they're making drugs and it's powered by a nuclear reactor, or they're making nukes and the employees are high on uppers. I can't tell what he's talking about. And the audience couldn't tell either.
Starting point is 00:10:31 Shocked and silent. Donald Trump making a promise that at this point is almost beyond parity. He says if you give us two more years, we will pass a great health care plan. It's been 11 years, sir. He ran on this in 2015 and 2016. They had a proposal in 2017, which would have made 30 million people lose coverage. In July of 2020, he told us that the plan was two weeks away. Well, it's almost 2027, and here's the promise.
Starting point is 00:11:00 Thank you. And we will pass a truly great healthcare plan that will stop all payments to big insurance companies which owned it. By the way, the big insurance company. they they they they they all those big monster they're monsters they take in billions and billions of dollars from our country they own the democrats that's why the democrats fight for obamacare because that's what it's all about Obama and we'll give the money directly to you the people so you can buy your own much better health care bomb at a much lower price and have a lot of money left
Starting point is 00:11:36 over any day now don't it's going to be any say it's going to happen so low. fast, your head will spin at our new health care plan. He's been saying this for 11 years. And the only plan they put together, Republicans gave up on because the estimates were back in 2017, if you do this, somewhere between 24 million and 32 million people will end up without health care. They will lose health care. Now, Donald Trump is doing everything he can to rehabilitate perceptions of his physical abilities. Forget about cognitive. That dude is gone, but on physical abilities. And so Trump gives his Texas audience the rundown. And the rundown is, I can go on ramps and I can go on stairs. And the audience, I have to tell you, is not particularly impressed
Starting point is 00:12:32 that Trump can walk upstairs. Someday I'm going to Trump. I'll be walking down. Don't forget when Biden left the stage, he spoke very short. like two minutes, one minute, as quickly as possible, could never find the stairs. I don't have that problem. You know, these things, you know how many stairs they have? Look, I can go ramp, I can go stare, I can go another stair, another stair in the back. I have a stair. He could never find a stair.
Starting point is 00:13:01 Light applause, very light applause from the audience. They seem to care more about, did my prices go down? Am I paying more or less for energy? Am I paying more or less for gas? Did Trump stick to his promise of no new Middle East wars or did he fail on that promise? They don't seem that impressed by Trump claiming he can use ramps or stairs. And that's where we are right now. Speeches like these, quite frankly, are why a lot of these right-wing influencers
Starting point is 00:13:32 seem to be sharing AI posts of Trump because the real posts are an absolute and complete disaster. Here is Trump talking about transgender children, one of his favorite topics. But the choice in this election is very simple. You can vote for the radical left, Democrat communist, to loot your wealth, raise your taxes by $4 trillion. Annihilate your borders, shut down Oklahoma oil and gas, mutilate your children, your transgender children. They are mutilizing your transgender children. children, and that can't be allowed under Sleepy Joe. What is he talking about?
Starting point is 00:14:17 The audience has become desensitized in a different way. They don't seem to give a damn about any of this stuff. Finally, Donald Trump once again talking about James Tala Rico's veganism, but he continues to use the term vegan. He's a vegan. Jesus. We're going to elect Mike Masey. really terrific people as your next governor.
Starting point is 00:14:47 And just across the state in the line of Texas, we're going to defeat Democrat communist James Telefrico. Yay. Who's terrible. You know, he's a vegan in Texas. That doesn't work, right? But now he's trying to pretend he's not a vegan. I said it just before.
Starting point is 00:15:07 I hate to bore you if you've heard it. So he goes out and he goes to barbecues, and he has meat. And every time he goes up, he says, excuse me just for a moment, he goes to the back of the tent and he throws up all over the place because he's a vegan and you can't get elected as a vegan in Oklahoma or in Texas. Do you understand why he's pretending to like meat even though he's really vegan? I got to tell you, I think for every minute Trump is doing these events, the Republicans are losing a thousand votes. This cannot possibly be helping. But the counterpresent, you, but the counterpart, point is, David, you know, do you know who Trump is trying to convince? Well, let's take a look at
Starting point is 00:15:48 that. In Trump's America, some of his supporters are truly sick. Oh, whoa, whoa, this is a, this, I almost got out, got ahead of myself there. I want you to listen carefully to this interview that Real America's voice did with some Trump rally attendees. There are about five different things happening at the same time. Here are Trump supporters yesterday at one of the rallies explaining what they believe Trump represents. And they talk about all the things Trump's going to fix, but they get into some Christian nationalism stuff. Take a listen. What are the biggest issues for you for this election? By the way, the noise you're hearing is it's pouring. And so it's rain smacking against these people's umbrellas. Got into it. So I don't really have a comment on that. When people, you know,
Starting point is 00:16:40 are talking about gas prices, gas prices, gas prices. Do you think this election is about a bigger, a bigger, I don't know. When people are talking about gas prices and complaining, what do you want to say to them? I just want to tell them just to write it out. He's going to fix it. Believe in him, stand strong, and we will be okay. So that's a cult belief. He hasn't fixed it for 11 years, but if you just give him two more, he'll really get it all taken care of. It's one of those things where if Trump doesn't get his Congress in the midterms, a really strong showing, he's not going to be in trouble. We're going to be in deep trouble.
Starting point is 00:17:24 Our gas prices were higher when Obama was president. Our gas prices, of course, completely untrue. Prices were higher during Biden. They were briefly higher during Biden, but not because of anything Biden did. They were higher globally. Another thing, I have a 15 year old grandson. I don't want war in this country. Trump started a war.
Starting point is 00:17:47 Trump started a war. Now, let's see if she comes around to that. My grandson is at an age in four years that he can be sent overseas. And if he chooses that, I'll be very proud of him. But all the abortion, it's not- Notice how we're now on a different topic. Wait a second. Trump started a war. She doesn't want war. Trump started a war. She's there to cheer Trump. So then she goes, bink, and just resets. And now she goes abortion.
Starting point is 00:18:17 Nothing. It's evil. And that's one thing that Trump stands for is as Christians. Ah. We're being killed everywhere. We don't have anybody to stand up for Christians anymore. Christians are being killed everywhere. They are the biggest victim. victims and no one is defending Christians, says this woman, other than Donald Trump. Okay. So when I'm here, I want to see two people, Trump and Jesus. Oh, wow. And. Powerful testimony. If we don't keep that our party, then our country will be no more.
Starting point is 00:19:04 You want not want Muslims taking over. Ah. If the Muslims take over, we cannot have them. Country was based on Christian values. If they want to have Sharia law, they can go to their country and have Sharia law. We don't believe in mutilation here. I thought Trump said it's mutilization. Are you from Texas?
Starting point is 00:19:33 No, I'm from right here in Oklahoma. I live 20 minutes. Okay. So I am curious to go back to. You, you, okay, born in Texas. Very interesting to have a number of the Muslim centers coming up in Texas. So I'd like your thoughts on that. I have horrible thoughts. That's probably a lot of profanity that I probably shouldn't use.
Starting point is 00:19:55 I don't think that they should be here. If you want me talking about Muslims, I am going to start swearing. So I'm going to start, I'm going to not do that. This isn't their country. They're coming into my country. They expect us to go to their country and dress like them, act like them, but yet they can come here and try and take over my country. Absolutely not.
Starting point is 00:20:11 All right. So what is the, you know, there's a lot that we could focus on. And it's like, oh, these people seem to be completely clueless. And they seem like extremely vindictive, just horrible people. We have data on the religious aspect of it. And P RRI, the public religion research institute, I think is what it stands for. They did a huge survey of 22,000 Americans last year. And they found that about a third of Americans qualified as either adherence or sympathizers with what we
Starting point is 00:20:39 describe as Christian nationalism. Now, Christian nationalism being the belief that Christianity should officially be the government. The government should be officially Christian. Christian beliefs should dictate what the law is and what the federal government does. And among Republicans, 56% believe that. And Oklahoma is one of the places where those beliefs were most prevalent. So when someone says, I want to see Trump and Jesus, we don't want Muslims taking over this sort of stuff, There is a political ideology there that is not. I'm a Christian, but we have separation of church and state. There are tens of millions of American Christians who that's where they go.
Starting point is 00:21:16 They go, my private beliefs are Christianity. We have separation of church and state. That should not inform the law or government any more than atheism or Islam or Hinduism or anything should. But then you've got these people, which is the belief that Christianity is tied to what it means to be American. the government should privilege Christian values and Christian people. People outside of that identity are less legitimately American. Now, notice the contradiction. We're being killed everywhere, followed by Muslims don't belong here.
Starting point is 00:21:47 The person saying religious persecution is simultaneous. The person saying I am being discriminated against on the basis of my religion or people like me are, is saying we should persecute a different religious group. And just to state the obvious, Muslim Americans are not. Americans, some were born here, some immigrated, some converted, some were born into the religion. Same thing with all other religions. Some have been here for generations. The Constitution does not contain a Christianity requirement for citizenship. And this is where the data is really interesting. Among Americans, Christian nationalists who are the Christian nationalists who are about a third of the
Starting point is 00:22:27 population, two thirds of that group believes immigrants are invading the country. and replacing the cultural and ethnic background of the country. So this Christian nationalist group is very radical. It is a very radical group. Now, this doesn't mean every Christian believes that or that every Trump supporter believes it. In fact, according to Pew, only 13% of Americans wanted the federal government to formally declare Christianity the religion of the US. But we have an important constituency.
Starting point is 00:22:57 A lot of this stuff predates Trump, anti-abortion politics predate Trump, anti-Muslim sentiment predates Trump. Trump has become a vessel through which these anxieties are expressed and they believe Trump is the one who is going to bring this. Now, he's only got two years left. I don't think he's going to bring it, but that is what these people want. A lot of people carrying debt don't think to themselves, I'm in trouble. They're not necessarily behind on payments.
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Starting point is 00:25:52 with the same focus on comfort and quality. Plenty of styles and colors. Go to Sheath underwear. com slash Pacman and use the code Pacman for 20% off. The link is in the description. Donald Trump is now doing something that is essentially impossible to square with the Donald Trump of 2016 and 2017, which is the following. Defense Secretary Pete Hegsa is about to announce a huge reduction in the highest ranks of the U.S. military, 20%. Now, this is not a 20% reduction in the entire military. It's a 20% reduction in positions reserved for generals and admirals. And to understand how strange this is, you have to remember how Trump originally sold himself on the military. When Trump first ran for president, one of his complaints about former president Barack Obama.
Starting point is 00:26:49 Exactly. Was that the military was depleted. Remember, the cupboards are bare. Sir, we have no bullets. Exactly. Right. We have no bullets. We don't have enough troops. We don't have enough people and ships and planes in any of it. And in 2016, Trump complained, you know, our active duty military fell from about two million
Starting point is 00:27:16 people in 1991 to about 1.3 million. It's depleted and we need to rebuild it and it's got to be bigger, stronger and better equipped and more powerful. Now, fast forward to today where under the leadership of Trump, if you can call it that, his own defense secretary is going the opposite direction, but at the very top. And this is also a really important distinction. Hegseth is expected to reduce general and admiral positions by 20% starting in 2027. This isn't the only thing that's happening.
Starting point is 00:27:47 Hegseth already ordered a minimum 10% reduction in general and flag officer positions last year. also ordered separate cuts to four star and National Guard general positions. And now they're going from a target of 10% cut to 20% cut. And at least 20 generals, admirals and civilian military leaders have been fired or left positions since Hegset took over. This includes important positions like chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Navy's top uniformed officer, the Army's top uniformed officer, the Air Forces, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the heads of U.S. Army Europe, U.S. Army Africa, U.S. Cyber Command. Some were fired,
Starting point is 00:28:34 some retired early, some resigned. The administration has sort of given different explanations or sometimes no explanation at all for different departures. So there's a couple of really important questions to ask to figure out what's happening here. There is going to be a temptation to sort of stuff this into a square pen. despite it being a triangle. Now, narrative number one is Trump is destroying the military. That will be narrative number one. He's reducing staffing.
Starting point is 00:29:04 He's destroying the military. The other one will be Trump is finally taking on the military industrial complex. I think both of these narratives are wrong and they require a little bit more nuance. Now, there is an argument you could make that the problem isn't the total size of the military. This is not an argument I would make. I think the problem is the total size. But you could make an argument. It's not the total size of the military. That's the problem. It's too top heavy. Too many layers of command, too many senior officers. And so you've got bureaucracy and it slows down decision making and you're putting distance between the people making the decisions and the people
Starting point is 00:29:42 carrying them out at the bottom of the totem pole. That is a debate that has nothing to do with Trump. It predates Trump. And even the Congressional Research Service has documented the disagreement over over, does the military have too many generals and admirals or not enough? So reducing the number of generals is not an insane thing to do. But this is where it gets very confusing because for years, there was a fraction of people that looked at Trump and said, you know what? Maybe this guy, whatever else you think about him, he's finally going to take on the military industrial complex.
Starting point is 00:30:16 And you had some people on the left who fell for this before the 24 election. You know, I think it's Trump who's going to reduce the size. of the military footprint. He'll shrink the bureaucracy and end this cycle of endless Pentagon spending and more senior officials and contractors. But that was never something Trump was going to do. Trump's message was never the military is too big. It was always the military is too small. And his complaint was Obama depleted it. And we need more defense spending. And we need to rebuild and more bullets. And, you know, even in 2018, he asked his cabinet, find me some spending cuts. But he said the military, we had to fix the military. We need more money there. It's
Starting point is 00:30:58 been depleted. It's in bad shape. So that's what makes this really bizarre. We are getting something that superficially looks like you're downsizing. But the motivation is not downsizing the military or that we spend too much on defense or that Trump wants to shrink our footprint around the world militarily. Heg Seth simply says, we've got to get rid of bureaucratic players and redundant command structures. And to me, it seems that this fundamentally is about removing obstacles or potential obstacles for Trump doing whatever the hell he wants with the military, removing the sorts of folks who would actually say, sir, I don't know that that's a great idea. Now, remember that Trump has spent a long time attacking senior military officials.
Starting point is 00:31:48 They're woke. They're focused on diversity and they're not doing. warrior culture and all sorts of stuff. And so this restructuring is going to likely become something very different. Now, Senator Mark Kelly, who's a Democrat said they're trying to get rid of experienced leaders from the military so that Hegset can basically just get him to do whatever he wants and say, do this, do that. Hegseth's argument is the opposite. No, we'll be leaner, more nimble and more effective if we do this. But then there's another weird part. Overall, the numbers haven't moved in the direction you might expect. According to the Defense Department data that CBS looked at, there were 851 active duty generals and admirals as of July. And a year earlier, despite all of the
Starting point is 00:32:35 firings and rhetoric about getting leaner, the number increased slightly. Now, federal law caps it at 857 and Hegsteth says, let's cut it 20%. So this is where I think you really, it's very easy to do a superficial analysis. You have three separate questions. Should the military have fewer generals? Should the U.S. have a smaller military? And should it be Heg-Seth under Trump removing and deciding which military leaders to remove? These are all very different questions. You could believe the Pentagon's bloated while also worrying about why are experienced commanders being removed. That doesn't really make a lot of sense. You could say we should get rid of unnecessary bureaucracy, but I don't want a political purge.
Starting point is 00:33:22 And you could say, I want a smaller military footprint while still recognizing that that's not what is actually being pursued here. They are trying to get obstacles out of the way. And this is why I think the politics are so backwards. Trump entered the national stage saying, our military is too small and too weak. It needs to be bigger and stronger. And some of his supporters eventually convinced themselves, Trump is actually going to shrink it.
Starting point is 00:33:45 He's going to get us away from the military industrial complex. The administration is now preparing to get rid of a bunch of senior military positions for reasons that have nothing to do with anti-war or anti-military industrial complex. Trump is not Dwight D. Eisenhower going military-industrial conflicts. You've got to be careful. Pete Hegseth isn't dismantling anything. They're restructuring leadership so that it will at the end of the day be more loyal to the hairbrained and demented foreign policy and military ideas of Trump.
Starting point is 00:34:18 and Hexstaff. That's what this is really about. And they're happy to do it by kicking out people with decades of institutional military experience. So this needs to be examined. But Trump is not the guy who is going to solve any of the real problems we have with our military. And meanwhile, meanwhile, he's enamored with dictators. Donald Trump is once again talking about his friendship. He thinks he's friends with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. And what he says is remarkable. Trump goes, Kim is a friend of mine. He doesn't like a lot of other people.
Starting point is 00:34:58 I'm the only one that he likes in the whole wide world. Take a listen to this. To me, he happens to be a friend of mine. Kim Jong-un. He's a friend of mine. He likes Trump. Doesn't like a lot of other people. I'm about the only person in the entire world that he likes.
Starting point is 00:35:12 And I like him. I get in a lot of heat when I say that. People say that's terrible. As bad as it is that Donald Trump finds this twisted enjoyment and amusement in the thought of being liked and respected by another dictator, the worst part is Kim is playing Trump like a fiddle. And that makes our president vulnerable to being manipulated, the way that he's been manipulated by others.
Starting point is 00:35:39 Now the truth is Kim Jong-un has relationships and like, you know, by Trump standards, likes others. Jim Jong-un has a relationship with Vlad, Vladimir Putin. He has a relationship with Chinese president Xi Jinping and a bunch of other foreign leaders. And in fact, North Korea has become a lot closer to Russia in recent years. But the most interesting part about this is how Trump talks about Kim. It's so personal. He likes me. He really likes me.
Starting point is 00:36:04 And I like him too. And I'm the only one that he likes, you know. It's not like he likes other people. And this has been going on for years. Now, during Trump's first presidency, they went from third. threatening each other with, quite frankly, nuclear destruction to writing themselves beautiful love letters and holding these face-to-face meetings and saying, and then we fell in love. And there is nothing inherently wrong with an American president talking to an adversary.
Starting point is 00:36:32 Obama talked to Putin. But if talking to Kim Jong-un is how Trump ends up convinced that he is getting one over on Kim. He doesn't really understand what's going on. Now, I don't know that I even need to say this. If diplomacy makes ourselves, makes our country and our allies safer, cool. If talking to whoever reduces the risk of a nuclear war, that's great. The problem is Trump doesn't understand the difference between a dictator manipulating you with flattery and a dictator being willing to actually help you advance American interests.
Starting point is 00:37:13 Look at what actually happened. Trump met Kim in Singapore in 2018. They met again in Hanoi in 2019. Trump became the first sitting American president to step into North Korea when they met at the DMZ. There were pictures and TV and declarations and all of it. The objective of denuclearizing North Korea hasn't happened. And Trump in 2018 fell for the same failed promises that North Korean leaders have made to American presidents for a long time.
Starting point is 00:37:42 He didn't do any of that stuff. And the second summit failed with basically both sides going, I think we're going to, we can't even get to really starting negotiations in a serious way. And in fact, North Korea has not only not given up its nuclear program, it's continued developing nuclear weapons and missiles. And now Kim's government rejects the idea that they should surrender anything. So the framing of Trump here really matters. Whether Kim likes Trump in whatever simplistic way Trump is interpreting it, the
Starting point is 00:38:12 doesn't really matter. Kim Jong-un is not your neighbor. He's not like, oh, wait, since we like each other, he'll come to my next barbecue or, you know, well-done steak eating competition or whatever. He leads a nuclear-armed adversarial state. And when you're dealing with someone like that, personal affection should not really figure into the foreign policy outcomes. And in fact, it's a vulnerability. If a leader treats as evidence that the other side can be trusted, that they really seem to like me and they say nice things about me, that's how we. get into this mess to begin with with Putin at the Helsinki summit during Trump's first term. You know, he said very strongly, we didn't hack the DNC. We didn't do the hacking. And he was very
Starting point is 00:38:53 powerful in that. What? He's flattering you. You're just enamored with this guy. Now, we don't know what Kim really thinks of Trump. We shouldn't pretend that we know. Maybe Kim really likes Trump. I don't know. But almost certainly Kim's interests are strategic. What is strategically useful in terms of a relationship with Trump and Kim has every incentive to encourage whatever relationship gives North Korea leverage. And most dictators have figured out the way to get leverage with Trump is to flatter him. It's to placate him. And it has worked because Trump is fascinated by the idea that these big, strong guys, they lead very strongly, that they like Trump personally, that they respect Trump personally.
Starting point is 00:39:37 Even if it's true, who gives a damn? The metric should be, has North Korea become less dangerous? Is its nuclear arsenal growing or shrinking? Have we gotten any concessions that we can even enforce or are our allies safer? What about South Korea? And when you look at the history of Trump's relationship with Kim, it's really a warning about the difference between spectacle on one hand and then results. Trump got meetings where they took pictures and letters exchanged and he stepped into North
Starting point is 00:40:09 Korea and all of this stuff. But North Korea kept its nuclear weapons. Kim is more deeply integrated with Russia and China than in a long time. And the nukes are going nowhere. So Trump's like Kim likes me. Maybe we should go, hey, what about what he's given us in return? He likes you. He really likes it.
Starting point is 00:40:29 Cool. What about making the world safer? Trump has achieved nothing as far as that's concerned. Now, I hope to see you Saturday, October 3rd. at the Springfield Symphony Hall in Springfield, Massachusetts. I will be there at 6 p.m. with Jessica Tarlov. The event is open to the public. We will discuss our books and then we will sign books 6 p.m. tomorrow, October 3rd, Symphony Hall, Springfield, Massachusetts. AI tools are everywhere now, but most people aren't even aware how much AI can help their business
Starting point is 00:41:04 and their daily workflow. Our sponsor, Outskill, is hosting a free two-day, AI mastermind training this Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Eastern, you don't need any coding or technical background. And over those two days, you're going to learn practical skills, how to use AI to automate repetitive tasks or building agents that can handle multi-step work, connecting it to sheets or notion or CRMs. So the information moves on its own. They are going to give you ready-made systems that you can put to use right away. Outskill is, rated 4.9 out of 5 on trust pilot. More than 10 million professionals have taken their programs learning directly from the experts with experience at Microsoft and Nvidia. The training
Starting point is 00:41:52 is normally almost $400. They're offering it free right now to my audience. If you attend both days, you'll also get bonuses worth $1,500 including an AI prompt Bible, a monetization roadmap and a personalized toolkit. Availability is limited. Grab your free seat using the link in the description. Every political story has two parts. What happened and what different media outlets want you to think happened. And you can see the framing difference pretty clearly in this story about Donald Trump signing
Starting point is 00:42:30 a $70 billion immigration bill after this long fight over ICE funding. On the left, the focus is what will the money fund? Billions for the next three years of Trump's mass deportation campaign. On the right, the emphasis is Trump taking future ice shutdowns off the table by signing the bill. One side is asking, what does this mean for immigration enforcement for mass deportations? The other is framing it as Trump ending the threat of ice shutdowns. This is why our sponsor ground news is so useful because it lets you compare coverage from
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Starting point is 00:43:29 Pete Buttigieg just said something. I hope Democrats are going to take very seriously heading in. into the midterms, which is that it is really not enough to win by a little bit. You need to win by enough that Trump and Republicans and whoever else they can deputize to try to help them can't turn a close election into weeks of chaos, litigation and challenges and trying to change the outcome. The way Buttigieg put it is the way a lot of people have put it, which is we have to make it too big to rig. And I think without being conspiratorial, it's good to talk about what that means. Now, I am not saying today that Trump has a secret machine to magically change votes
Starting point is 00:44:11 overnight electronically or whatever. Trump has made allegations about that from 2020, about Democrats. They were unproven allegations. But what we do know is that they are using a lot of techniques out in the open to try to swing the election in their favor. And in the back pocket are some of these other possibilities, trying to seize voting machines, trying to declare emergencies. We've gone through the list. You know, his my list. You know, his my My knowledge may vary with them. It's not really clear how far he would get with those techniques, but the point is the following. If control of Congress came down to a single seat, imagine for a moment, or that control of the
Starting point is 00:44:48 House came down to two seats or the Senate to one seat. What we don't want is a situation where it is so close that if whatever techniques Trump tries to use work on a single seat, they flip concede. control of the entire election. It would be much safer knowing that Donald Trump is going to do everything he can legally or maybe not even to try to win these elections. It would be better to have a really big margin. If Democrats flip 40 seats in the House, Trump is not going to be able to use hijinks to overturn 40 or I guess it would be 35 that need to be swapped for Republicans to maintain control. Even if we go, listen, I don't think he's going to succeed at this, but
Starting point is 00:45:34 But maybe he does something wacky and flips two of those seats back. If the margin is 40, then you're safe. Same with the Senate. If it all depends on one seat, having 51 or 50, and remember 50 goes to Republicans because the vice president gets the deciding vote, they are going to be motivated differently. And it's one decision, one seat that could determine control. So the point here is, we know Trump attacks the rules. We know Trump attacks the institutions.
Starting point is 00:46:00 Trump has explicitly said that Republicans should nationalize voting. They should take over the voting, deploy armed agents to the polling places, and all of the stuff where it's like at the end of the day, states administer elections, local government's administered elections. They want to sweep in all of these restrictions on mail and ballots. The Supreme Court blocked that. The administration wants to review state voter roles looking for supposed non-citizens, despite non-citizen voting being insanely rare.
Starting point is 00:46:31 And then just recently, a federal judge blocked another Trump. administration effort, which would have withheld some federal counterterrorism money, unless states change how they do elections. So the point of all of this is they're doing all of that stuff. The Buttigieg argument, my argument, the argument of others is, if we give them a close election that you can fight over, it could be easier for them to get away with something crazy. And Buttigieg even specifically pointed to Maga Mike Johnson's delay in seeding Adelaide
Starting point is 00:47:03 to Grahalva. Remember, we interviewed her. She had won. They were refusing to seat her. And imagine if control of the House came down to one, two or three seats. You've got a disputed race and a delayed seating and a lawsuit. And all of a sudden, it all hinges on these couple or two or three seats. If Democrats win 30, 40, whatever, it's totally different. And as Pete Buttigieg said it, there's just only so many places and only so many ways. that you can do that. I think this connects directly to something we've been talking about for months. For months. Look at the permission structure that has been built before any votes have been counted. So you're suspicious about mail-in ballots? Let's question those. Let's question
Starting point is 00:47:51 the voter rolls. Let's question how long it's taking to vote. Let's suggest that some Democratic states are corrupt. And then if Republicans lose, you already have the explanation. They They did something with all that stuff we've been talking about. After 2020, we saw some versions of that. Trump, of course, lost. He pressured Georgia officials to find enough votes to change the results. He backed an effort with these fake slates of electors. He pressured Mike Pence on certification.
Starting point is 00:48:20 He said it was stolen but provided no evidence. And so too big to rig is the best defense. Should Mark Elias and his team of lawyers be fighting? Of course they should. Should we be working in every venue we can? Of course we should. But the important thing is if the margin is massive, they really can't do anything. And so the answer, lawyers are good, but voters are better.
Starting point is 00:48:50 Overwhelming participation. Do not spend the next month until this election, refreshing polls and assuming someone else has it covered, House races, Senate races, governor. or state legislatures, go out and vote. If the election comes down to one seat or ballot controversy, that is massive leverage for anyone trying to manufacture doubt. If it's an overwhelming result, they'll still claim it was rigged. They love doing that, but it's not going to be possible to overturn it. And I think this is really important beyond 2026. Pete Buttigieg said something else that I think is really interesting, which is the back. If we're looking for the backstop for democracy,
Starting point is 00:49:29 Is it Congress? Pete says no. Is it the courts? Pete says no. It's voters. And there is something fundamental here. If democratic institutions work, they work because enough people insist that we must respect election results. And we don't want to give anybody ambiguity that they might be able to exploit. And a one seat margin to fight over is ambiguity. Let's not give it to them. Make it a decisive, undeniable, massive result, and then put them in the position of making the absurd claim. They rigged 40 elections in 40 different states. Give me a break. I don't think any of their claims are believable.
Starting point is 00:50:12 But if it comes down to a seat, they're going to be able to convince more people and pull more people in. We don't want that. So we've got to make this absolutely massive, no matter where you live, no matter where you vote. We have reached the point where one of the most powerful Republicans of the United States of the last generation is now warning, my party has been taken over by bigots and Nazis. And he is openly calling one of the specific people moving through Republican circles a Nazi.
Starting point is 00:50:42 You might say, well, Democrats must be doing that, right? No, I'm talking about Carl Rove. George W. Bush's former deputy chief of staff, he kind of built the Republican party that lasted until Trump. He was one of the architects of the Iraq war. This is not a nice guy, by the way, to be clear. And even Carl Rove is looking at what the Republican Party has become. And he is saying, what the hell happened here? Quote, my party is being infiltrated by people like Beau French. Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets with a bunch of Republican leaders. This guy is a Nazi. And then he went further. He said, we didn't labor in the wilderness to build a conservative party that was
Starting point is 00:51:24 inclusive and welcoming to see it taken over by a bunch of bigots. Now, let's be careful. Let's be precise. Rove did not say, my party is now the Nazi party and everybody should abandon it. He said there are Nazis who are now in the party. He says, Nick Fuentes is a Nazi. He said people like Beau French have infiltrated the party. And the party is being taken over by bigots. It is still an extraordinary thing to hear from Carl Rove. Now, I know that there are people who will go, the reason Carl Rove is saying this is because the Democratic Party has become very right wing. Now, he's not supporting the Democratic Party. He's not saying anything good about the Democratic Party.
Starting point is 00:52:03 He's simply analyzing where his party is. Now, there is a sort of irony here. Carl Rove gets credit for saying this now. But he can't be allowed to pretend he showed up at the scene of the accident and didn't cause the crash. He was one of the architects of the entire George W. Bush political operation. The Bush era was not this unrelated thing. And in my first book, The Echo Machine, I trace the story of how Bush and Bushism played a role in converting the Republican Party into Trumpism. And so he is part of that, Carl Rove.
Starting point is 00:52:42 He is part of the history. And this is a political realignment of sorts that started from the civil rights era. It went through the Southern strategy, the rise of mind. conservative talk radio, Newt Gingrich, the Bush years, the Tea Party, Obama and racism against Obama. All of that eventually led to Donald Trump. So Roe's analysis may be accurate, but he's part of the explanation. But Trump didn't descend from the sky and take over a party that was otherwise healthy and logical.
Starting point is 00:53:13 There were decades of building towards Trumpism and increasingly treating the other side like enemies and grievance politics, culture war politics, fear and outrage and all of it amplified by the right wing media system. And Carl Rove was a part of that. He was one of the most important Republican political strategist during that evolution. Now, that doesn't mean Carl Rove wanted Nick Fuentes. It doesn't mean George W. Bush wanted Nick Fuentes, of course not. It also, I mean, listen, I try to be complete in my analysis.
Starting point is 00:53:43 There are real differences between the Bush Republican Party and what became MAGA. serious differences on interventionism, protectionism, and various other isms, as George W. Bush said, there were differences there. But you also can't tell the history of the Republican Party by starting the clock after Roe is gone. So when Roe says, you know, we didn't build this party for it to be taken over by a bunch of bigots, part of me goes, good. I'm glad you're saying that.
Starting point is 00:54:13 But also, you did kind of build this party to what it eventually became. And some of the people who are, you know, horrified by the destination built the road that was used to travel there. And the immediate context is Texas Republican Bo French. He's the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner. He posted this picture of South Asian students at a University of Texas football game and suggested that for, as evidenced by the picture, foreigners are displacing Americans. And there was no basis for assuming anyone pictured was foreign. They just weren't white. One later said, I'm a naturalized citizen.
Starting point is 00:54:52 And there are all sorts of similar comments, comments about Jews that French has made, Muslim, South Asian Americans, all these different groups. Last year, Republican lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick said French should resign as Tarrant County Republican chair because he posted a poll asking, are Jews or Muslims a bigger threat to America? And so Carl Rove has had enough. And he says in that race, he's voting for John Rosenthal over French. And this is not a liberal guy. This is a guy who basically his career is let's elect Republicans.
Starting point is 00:55:25 And he's looking at the coalition and he's going, in this one race, I'm going to vote for the Democrat. Now, I do think it's interesting that Carl Rove specifically brought up the Nick Fuentes meeting with leaders in Dallas. And he said, this guy is a Nazi. because there was a period, a couple years, where Republicans would say, these are irrelevant fringe characters. Don't pay attention to them. They don't represent Republicans. Republicans aren't paying attention to them.
Starting point is 00:55:51 They're just people on the internet. Carl Roe's concern is different now. And his concern is they are no longer fringe. They are meeting with mainstream Republicans. And so I do think that Carl Roe's statements are remarkable. This is one of the big architects of where we are saying this isn't what we've been. built. Now, what I think he means is this isn't what we wanted to build. A better statement would have been, I thought I was helping build something different. And what I did helped to build what we
Starting point is 00:56:21 got. I would appreciate that much more. A little introspection that you helped with the conditions that led to this. Trump's not the start of the story. Nick Fuentes isn't the start of the story. Karl Rove isn't either. But he helped get it to where it is now. And much like when Rogan goes, this isn't what we signed up for. Well, you endorsed the guy, dude. Now, Rogan argues, I didn't think he would do this stuff, to which I said, I told you he would do this stuff. We all were saying that he was going to do this stuff. So Rogan made the mistake. It wasn't that he was misled. He refused to see this was what was going to happen. Still good to hear him say it. Still good to to hear Carl, Carl Rove say it. But they need to examine and consider their own role in all of the
Starting point is 00:57:04 stuff. And their role is nasty. This is insane. 153 million American and Canadian driver's license scans were leaked to the dark web. Most from Americans, they were stolen from ID scan.net, a company that handles 21 million ID checks a month. The leaks include your photo, name, birth date, address, infrared and ultraviolet layers that are used to verify it's a real license, which makes it really easy to copy. Sometimes your license centers third party systems because you gave it to a hotel check-in clerk. I did it a few nights ago when I was traveling. Who knows what they're doing with it? And this is why I use ORA. Our sponsor, ORA, monitors the dark web for exposed info, including your driver's license. It'll scan 41% more categories than the next leading provider.
Starting point is 00:57:57 If someone tries using your identity, or it can send you fraud alerts up to 650 times faster than competitors, It also includes antivirus, a password manager, and up to $5 million in identity theft insurance and recovery support. Now, my audience can try ORA for free for 14 days, gives you plenty of time to see whether your driver's license has been exposed. Go to aura.com slash Pacman. The link is in the description. When government starts taking sides on religion, everybody loses. That is not a theoretical question. Right now, Trump's new so-called religious liberty commission is attacking church-state separation.
Starting point is 00:58:41 They want more religion in public institutions. They want more religious influence in public policy. They want pressure to push a constitutional line that exists for a reason. We have to fight back, not because we're against religion, but because we understand that there is separation of church and state. Religious freedom should exist and it should have nothing to do with government. promoting religion. Government must be neutral. Our sponsor, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, works to keep state and church separate. So you've got free thinkers, atheists, agnostics, non-religious Americans who don't get erased from the American story. Power in a democracy should come from
Starting point is 00:59:22 people, not religion. Please visit ffrf.us slash David or text my name, David, to 511, 511. to learn more or to join. That's ffrf.us slash David or text David to 511 511. Text fees may apply. The link is in the description. We start today with a very simple but nasty message. Gunth is giving me the following feedback via Spotify. Packman sucks. And my name is also misspelled. Honest question. If you don't like me, if you don't like this show, why are you wasting time seeking out my Spotify feed? Remember, Spotify is not even like an algorithmic content delivery thing where it was accidentally served to you.
Starting point is 01:00:16 You had to seek out my Spotify and write Pacman sucks and you don't even spell my name right. Does that make you feel better? What's going on in your life that this is how you choose to spend your time? when there are shows I don't like, I don't think about them. I don't waste my time going and trying to find them. But, you know, we will take it under advisement, Gunth. In advance of my beautiful event with Don Lemon, nasty guy in Barnes & Noble at the Upper West Side Barnes & Noble last week, we got positive and negative feedback. And one of the pieces of feedback was from Chris VR 22, who said, L.O.L. This is a
Starting point is 01:00:59 is going to be hysterical to listen to these two liars echo chamber lies as they compliment each other about their lies as they lie about their lies. Well, you know, Chris, I see Chris wearing a Yankees hat in his profile image. I don't know if Chris is located in New York. If you are, Chris, I'm glad you didn't go because we had a phenomenal time. Don was a great host and moderator of a conversation. We took questions from the people at Barnes and Noble. I signed about 100 or so books. And it was a beautiful evening. And in fact, one of the things that came from it, I've been talking a lot with other creators. I talked about this with Dawn after the event. And I had a dinner with a bunch of creators last week. One of the things people really seem to be
Starting point is 01:01:50 craving right now are more genuine, deep connections in the real world to people. I mean, listen, I say this at my own peril. I think a lot of people are realizing that the disgusting toxicity of a lot of these digital platforms is not good for people's mental health. It's probably not good for your physical health. And it's also not great as far as fostering any kind of deeper conversations. And so people want to be out in the world. They want to be meeting in real life and meeting other people who watch the show.
Starting point is 01:02:22 And it was a phenomenal, phenomenal event. And Chris wasn't there. I wish I could say that you were missed, Chris, but I think it was the right decision not to go. All right. Feedback on interviews, both specific and general. Okay. So here is something more general where on the subreddit, Festival Best of Fuel wrote these interviews bring nothing to the show.
Starting point is 01:02:52 All these candidates do is talk shit on their opponent. It's the definition of preaching to the choir. David, sir, I beg of you with tears in my eyes at the very least cut these in half. It's so damn redundant. So, listen, cutting the interviews in half wouldn't really fix anything because once you've decided, if you're on YouTube, it's just as easy to skip an interview, whether it's 10 or 20 minutes long. Like, you're still just skipping a video. And if you're listening, to the podcast and an interview comes on and you're going to go through the trouble of skipping it, you're still just skipping forward one section no matter what. Like it doesn't really matter
Starting point is 01:03:35 if the interview is 10 or 20 minutes long. So maybe the interviews aren't for you. What I will tell you is we are very judicious in the interviews that we do book for the show. If we wanted to, this show could be five hours a day, all interviews. We get five to seven emails a day. No, not even. We, we get five-ish emails a day from elected officials and 10 to 15 emails a day from publicity firms offering people for the show. Okay. If we were like, let's just make it easy. Just book interview after interview. I don't have to do any research. I don't have to, you have to research for the interviews, but I don't have to like prep stories and think about what I want to say. We'll just make it an interview show. It would be really easy to do that. We try. We don't always succeed.
Starting point is 01:04:25 But we're trying to choose the interviews that will bring something interesting to the show, which means a diverse group of elected officials, candidates, nonpolitical people, scientists, doctors, professors, all of this different stuff. And I get that the interviews aren't for everyone. Some people love the interview. Some people don't. But it's basically equally easy to skip the interviews, if that's what you want to do, regardless of how long the interview is.
Starting point is 01:04:51 Okay. Crumpled up thoughts made a post on the subreddit about my interview with Hunter Biden. And I want to kind of walk you through the way that this went. Because one of the things I always say is criticize me for things I've actually done. Don't make, don't make stuff up. Crumpled up thoughts wrote, David not addressing Hunter's meme coin rug pull is troubling. Hunter is clearly on a money making and rehab tour through podcasts and his crypto launch. It's really surprising that in a conversation centered around a.
Starting point is 01:05:22 accountability and competency, David failed to bring this up. I would think potential grifters acting in a grifting mentality would be fair game. And of course, you might be reading this going, David, you did bring that up. A bunch of the interview was about Hunter's meme coin. And you were critical. And after this was pointed out to them, crumpled up thoughts came back and edited their post and said, David did address this. And I was wrong to state he didn't. Now, a bunch of people then said, you should have brought up the crypto meme coin right away. I disagree. One of the things that you have to do as an interviewer is think about the best flow for getting the most useful answers from a guest. If you bring a guest on and I go, hey, Hunter Biden is here. What the F are you doing with this
Starting point is 01:06:10 crypto coin? That is immediately going to put him on the defensive. That is not going to be a good interview. We want to build to more sensitive issues. And so I completely disagree that the meme coin should have been brought up right up front. There's a specific reason that I went through the questions and topics in the way that I did. Come on, guys. Okay. If the interviews aren't for you, totally cool. But please criticize me for things that have actually happened on the show. All right. Jerome Johns commented on YouTube and said about Trump. If he put half the effort of his lying into doing right by us, we'd all be prosperous. This is such a good sort of drilling down of what is so wrong with this Trump political
Starting point is 01:07:01 era and the Trump presidency. There is so much effort put into making Trump look physically strong, making him look politically powerful, never admitting that he did anything wrong, optics and ads and all of this stuff. If he really cared about the average person and put 15% even of the time he spends on useless stuff into making people's lives better, think about how much better off the people of this country would be and how much better off the country overall would be. Trump never cared about that. It was always, who can I convince to donate money to me? And then when he wanted to push this whole, the election was stolen thing in 2020, who can I get to donate more money
Starting point is 01:07:42 to me so I can fight for you even though the money was going half or more. to pay off his campaign, dad's. It's pathetic guys. And if he did indeed just say, I'm going to spend the next six months solely laser focused on improving the lives of the average American, we would all be so much better off. I full commented on Instagram, convinced the Trump voice is becoming your stim now, LMAO. So I looked up what this means. It seems to be an autism thing. Like what I found when I looked up? What does it mean? What does it mean that the Trump voice It's becoming my stim. What does that mean?
Starting point is 01:08:18 That's nasty. I guess it comes from self-stimulation behaviors that are associated with autism spectrum disorder. I don't know. But I can tell you this. Ronda sanctimone. No. I like what I find funny about the Trump voice, which by the way, I don't think I'm particularly good at, is breaking into it instantly and then instantly coming right.
Starting point is 01:08:44 coming right out of it. But maybe I'm having a little too much fun with it. I don't know. Okay, Joe wrote in on Spotify with a beautiful critique and says the following. Never forget. A liberal news journalist exposed David as receiving DNC money. He pushed the cheap fake lie about Biden up until the 2024 debate. If you still believe anything this guy says, I have a beach house to sail you in Idaho. You're going to sail me into the into the night. Um, okay. So again, criticize me for things that have happened. I think this person is referring to an article by, I don't even think liberal news journalist is article is, is accurate. It's sort of like tech, tech writer provocateur.
Starting point is 01:09:38 Taylor Lorenz and the article didn't even allege. Forget about the, forget about whether the article was accurate, which is a different story, which we already kind of litigated. The article didn't even allege anything about DNC money. And as far as pushing a cheap, I don't know what cheap fake means, but as far as pushing lies about Biden up until the debate, I was pretty clear from early on, Biden has slowed down dramatically and should not run for reelection. Now, did the debate expose in much starker relief, the degree to which he shouldn't be running for reelection? Yes. But I always communicated to the
Starting point is 01:10:21 audience what I believed at the time. And that included in 2020 and 2021, 2022. If you compare Biden from now to Biden from the 2008 debate against Paul Ryan, it's a very different Joe Biden. And he shouldn't run for reelection. And, you know, as far as whether people believe this is an opinion show. You can agree or disagree with my opinions. Have at it. But, uh, some people have a lot of time on their hands. All right. Mr. Dad wrote in on Spotify and says, I'm in Texas and they have scaled back the number of polling places in my county by almost 100. We have thousands and thousands of more registered voters now than last time around. So they know it will be harder on people to vote. They are shameless. Yeah. We covered this last week. There is a lot going on in Texas. Now,
Starting point is 01:11:03 notice how I'm not demanding people be locked up. I'm not saying they have stolen it. What I'm telling you is there are news reports that should be concerning to us and they are about reducing the number of polling places, this rough tens of thousands of registrations whose status is unknown and they may have been not processed ever. There's a lot of hijinks going on. Will it end up affecting the election results? I can't say for sure today, but I'm very worried. And I think it is a great thing that Democrats have lawyers on the ground and are activating against this. Sketchy stuff. And when you see, let me even pull up the latest polling.
Starting point is 01:11:42 Real clear politics, Texas Senate. The latest polling out of the Texas Senate race has Tala Rica winning every single poll. The last one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine polls dating all the way back to September 8th. There is not a single one that can pack. is winning in. If they are coming to the conclusion that Paxton can't win and they need to figure out some other way to force him into the Senate, it makes sense they would start looking at hijinks and foul play. That's what we know as of right now. We got to do everything we can to prevent
Starting point is 01:12:21 them from getting away with it. We have a great bonus show for you today. Join pacman.com to sign up. And please remember to leave a review for my new book, pay attention on Amazon. It costs you nothing. to do it it really helps the book pay attention on amazon leave a review i'll see you on the bonus show

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