The David Pakman Show - Trump pushes legal limits as election bombshell drops

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

-- On the Show: -- Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor of Economics at MIT and a co-winner of the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, joins us to discuss his new book "What Happened to Liberal Democracy?: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity" -- A Postal Service whistleblower warns that Donald Trump's mail voting order could cause millions of Americans to not receive their mail-in ballots -- John Roberts warns that Donald Trump is likely acting unlawfully by demolishing the White House East Wing to construct a massive ballroom -- Clinical psychologist John Paul Garrison highlights distinct involuntary arm spasms that Donald Trump displays during recent appearances -- Donald Trump repeatedly appears to fall asleep and makes rambling statements during an event about his medical cost policies -- Donald Trump insults conservative residents who oppose local artificial intelligence data center developments by claiming they want to be poor -- Court documents reveal that Russian influence operations use sleeper groups and meme factories to shape American political opinion -- On the Bonus Show: Updates from David's trip, and much more... ⚠️ Ground News: Get 40% OFF their unlimited access Vantage plan at https://ground.news/pakman 📖 Bullies, Parasites & Slaves: Text PAKMAN to 511511 or go to https://bps.online 💻 Sponsored by Private Internet Access: 83% OFF + 4 months free at https://www.piavpn.com/Pakman 🛡️ Incogni lets you control your personal data! Get 60% off their annual plan: http://incogni.com/pakman -- 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 -- 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 (01:18) Trump planning to not send mail-in ballots (08:47) Chief Justice warns Trump is acting unlawfully (17:49) Trump appears to be having arm spasms (24:50) "Trump keeps falling asleep, looks sick" (36:55) Daron Acemoglu interview (58:54) Trump insults residents who don't want data centers (01:06:48) Russia shapes American opinion with meme factories Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with the coffee plus range, infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like coffee plus B12 to help support immune function, and coffee plus B6 to keep your day moving. Or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight. Our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you.

Discover coffee plus on nispresso.com. Today, a whistleblower inside the Postal Service is sounding an extraordinary alarm about the midterms. Potentially, millions of Americans may get their mail-in ballots late or they may not get them at all. Now, meanwhile, the Supreme Court has handed Donald Trump a stunning loophole where something may be illegal, but there may be nobody who can actually get into court and stop Trump from doing it. What are guardrails if no one can enforce them? And then we have to talk about Donald Trump himself. I'm not even talking about the strange physical glitches, although doctors are now noting those. And I'm not talking about Trump falling

asleep all the time, but that is going on. I'm talking about Trump insulting his own followers over data centers. And we have some remarkable documents showing just how sophisticated Russian influence operations have become. This is not, oh, what did Putin tell you to do it? But these are really sophisticated operations that we will be talking about. A lot to get to. Plus my interview with Duran Asamoglu, a very interesting conversation. All of that and more today. This is an absolute bombshell.

And if you're planning to vote by mail in the midterm elections, you need to know about this right now. There's a whistleblower inside the U.S. Postal Service who's warning that potentially millions of Americans might straight up not get their mail in ballots. You might be planning to vote my mail. You might be, as far as you know, expecting a mail-in ballot, and you might not get it. So let's start with the whistleblower's words there. Stunning, who says, quote, potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner or at all.

The in a timely manner is bad enough. And they've been sort of scheming on what if we can delay mail-in ballots the Republicans have, the MAGAs have. But now it's you might not get it at all. So it's not, it shows up a couple of days later than you thought, but there's still plenty of time to fill it out and submit it and to have it counted. It's it just doesn't show up. A whistleblower is warning that if this indeed happens as the New York Times is reporting,

it could throw these elections into complete and total chaos. This is being called a secretive, rushed attempt to implement Donald Trump's mail-in voting executive order. And there is a particularly important detail in the middle of all of this. And you know what it is because I've been covering this, which is that a federal judge already said, you can't do that. Judge Indira Talwani has temporarily blocked this plan. This was last week. We already spoke about it. And that is because the judge concluded that it exceeds the authority of the U.S. Postal Service. And by the way, it would cause completely insane chaos, which would result when you change election procedures barely two months before the midterm elections.

But according to this new whistleblower, they kept working on this system even after a judge said, you're not allowed to do that. And the whistleblower is describing the consequences as a, quote, catastrophic failure. Now, apparently there's an almost unbelievable potential failure. point in all of this, which is that the Postal Service has been rushing to create a new digital verification system for the mail-in ballots. And according to the report, and this is insane that you would design a system like this, if even one barcode on one single ballot doesn't scan correctly, the verification process could reject tens of thousands of ballots contained in that

bulk mailing batch. One barcode could disable tens of thousands of ballots. And they're trying to do it not for the 2028 election or the 2030 election. They're trying to do it for an election that is, I guess, eight and a half weeks away or nine weeks away as of today, eight, nine weeks, something like that. Now, remember why Donald Trump even says that all of this crap is necessary. He has spent years saying vote by mail is inherently corrupt. It's fraudulent. It's basically cheating. If you vote by mail, you're cheating.

If people encourage you to vote by mail, they are cheating. Now, there's no evidence of widespread mail and ballot fraud. We, you know, if you look at a system in a country of 340 million people, will you find some instances of someone voted, then died before the election day and their vote was counted? Well, yeah, you can find some of that. And different states have different rules as to have. you deal with that. Can you find instances of someone who is Tom Smith Jr. submitting a ballot and it's counted

as a ballot ballot for Tom Smith's senior who died? You can find some instances of that. Now it's still only one person voting and one vote, but the junior vote was attributed to senior. Can you find some instances of someone deliberately attempting to commit some kind of fraudulent voting act? You can. But we are talking about a number of votes that wouldn't even flip a single precinct.

never mind state or election result. We would love the number to be zero, country of 340 million people. You're going to have some of these anomalous or anomalous instances, but that doesn't mean that you go and you upend an entire system. Now, there is another small problem with Trump's argument of voting by mail is inherently corrupt, which is that Donald Trump regularly votes by mail. He has voted by mail twice this year and many times in the past. So it's another one of these situations where we have a system that's horrible. horribly corrupt. It's rife with cheating, except Donald Trump uses it and it's not a problem when he does it. Now, underlying all of this, we should talk about the political incentive. If Republicans really believed, if we make it as easy as possible for people to vote,

we're going to win because we've done such a great job. In other words, we just have to allow the will of the people who are very happy with us to rise to the top and we will win. if they believe that, do you think that they would be spending this much time and this much energy and this many resources on making it harder to vote by mail? So the obvious concern, and we've been talking about this since 2012 in Mitt Romney's campaign, back when I was only five years old, this is not about preventing fraud. This is about changing who successfully gets to vote. Now, Senator Richard Blumenthal, who put out this report, makes it more direct by saying the

Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. And that is right. About a third of Americans vote by mail. Michigan had 37% of its votes cast by mail in 2022. And California all automatically makes mail in ballots to voters a part of how they vote. And this could end up being critical to control of the house. So it is not like an abstract procedural fight. We're two months from an election.

It could determine control of Congress. And a federal judge has said to the postal service, stop this now. And they kept working on it. And now we have an insider saying you might not get your ballot at all or you might get it too late for it to be turned in. So my ask is do not wait until election day to discuss. that there's a problem. Go to vote.org. Go to your state or local election officials website. Check your voter registration. Confirm your address. Find out when your mail and ballot is supposed

to arrive. Figure out whether your state lets you track your ballot and have a plan to vote and maybe a backup plan. If you plan to vote by mail, know what your alternative would be. Can I vote early in person? Can I vote on election day? Where do I need to go? Do not allow a missing ballot to become a missing vote because this is exactly what they want to have happen where you go, I don't know what happened. I guess I'll just stay home. I didn't get my ballot. Now, one of my lights turned off. So it's extremely rude. I'm going to turn that light back on because I need clarity in both the metaphorical and literal sense today. Don't allow this insanity to prevent you from ultimately voting and making your voice heard. They're going to try to stop that

from happening for millions of people with these schemes, we can't let them do it. Speaking of the law, here is an incredible Supreme Court decision that basically says Trump may not have the legal authority to do what he's doing with the White House construction, but good luck finding anybody who is actually going to be able to stop him. And remarkably, this is a warning coming from conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. This is all about the ballroom, the ballroom that has already resulted in the demolition of the White House East Wing. Now, we've been covering this for a long time. And an architectural historian

and the National Trust for Historic Preservation sued to stop this project. And they had a bunch of different bases for making that lawsuit. But they argued fundamentally that Trump can't simply make massive alterations to one of the most significant public buildings in the country, without going through a process. A lower court agreed with that and said, you've got to stop construction. So Trump went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court's conservative majority, three of whom on that court were nominated by Trump himself, the conservative majority minus John Roberts has now said construction can continue. But here is where it gets completely nuts. The majority explicitly says, we are not saying, we are not saying,

Trump's ballroom is actually legal. What they ruled five to four is that the plaintiffs probably do not have standing to bring this particular challenge or to put it a different way. Maybe what Trump's doing is illegal. These aren't the people who can stop him, though. Now, John Roberts, listen, it's not about we like Roberts or we don't. He wasn't buying it. And he joined the three liberal justices in the dissent, and he pointed out something really important, which is, listen, Congress has not passed anything resembling an explicit authorization for the president to build this ballroom. And that matters because it is at the end of the day public property that the White House

represents. It is not Trump's house. He's simply allowed to live there like a tenant, our tenant, as the American people, while he is the president of the United States. He can't theoretically decide tomorrow. he wants to knock down half of it and put up Trump Tower, D.C. and at a casino because he thinks that that would look nice. And what Robert says is that the decision represents no victory for the separation of powers. That is an extraordinary sentence coming from the conservative chief justice,

because this now creates a much bigger problem than the ballroom specifically. The appeals court had already confronted the Trump administration with essentially that obvious hypothetical. If a president says, hey, you know what, I'm going to tear down the statue of liberty. Would they be allowed to do that? And the government's legal theory created this bizarre situation where the executive branch could potentially destroy a landmark and nobody suffering merely an aesthetic injury would have standing to get into court and stop it. Think about that.

If you as a plaintiff go, well, I'm an American, I'm a stakeholder, the tearing down of the statue of liberty, the ripping down of part of the White House. Aesthetically, it's damaging. That doesn't give you standing. Have you suffered financially? Do you have any standing to really sue? And this seems to be the loophole that Trump is benefiting from. So the question to me is not, is this legal?

It seems at this point based on everything that's been reviewed, legal experts, even this statement from John Roberts, it's almost certainly illegal what Donald Trump is doing. But it becomes, and this is sort of the name of the game under Donald Trump, who has standing, who can sue, who can get into court? quickly enough, will the Supreme Court actually do anything? Or is Trump Trump just going to be able to finish the thing before anybody can stop him? The plaintiffs here actually accused the administration of trying to essentially outrun judicial review. And that really captures the problem, because once you demolish a historic building, you can't later issue an injunction and go,

it must be undemolished, even under the hypothetical of rebuilding it to look like. it did, you've still demolished a historic building and effectively put a replica back up. So if you go back to this dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts ends with a Churchill quote where he says, we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us, sort of getting to the notion of the importance of a building above and beyond, like the physical bricks that make it up. And Roberts adds that this is all the more reason to ensure that those responsible for follow the rules when they're deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the people's

house, making again this point that this is not Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago to do what he pleases with. This is the people's house. And the Supreme Court has not ruled that the ballroom is legal. They're basically saying, we don't really think anybody who's trying to stop it has the standing to actually stop it. And this is even John Roberts. Now, we all. knew that this was going to be an utter and complete disaster as soon as without warning, people looked out the window and there was construction going on at the White House. We knew that this was not going to be a simple thing. And incredibly, there's an analogy here between the Iran war and what's going on with the ballroom, which is it was started in a hairbrained, ill-conceived

way with no real path to finish it. With Iran, it was, we don't really know what the objectives are. it's not clear we actually have the wherewithal in the capacity to win by any definition, which, by the way, we're not even really setting. With the ballroom, it was, here's the ballroom I kind of want to do. Architects are looking at it going, you really can't do this and you really shouldn't do it. aesthetically, it doesn't make sense. And also in terms of the size, none of these things make sense. Architects quit, but that didn't stop Trump from starting the demolition. It's the same theme, the Iran war and what's going on with the ballroom. At some point, if you keep seeing that same theme and pattern over and over again. You got to say, maybe the problem is the guy at the top.

And I think it is obvious that that is the problem here. So maybe not even the Supreme Court will be able to put a stop to this, which is disgusting. So we've got to take power away from Trump. And we've got to prevent him from even being in a position to carry this atrocity through. 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 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 the left, right, and center in one place, along with factuality ratings and info about who owns the outlets. I've been using ground news for years. It can really help you see through the political spin that blinds a lot of news consumers. And right now you can get 40% off the same vantage plan I use. Go to ground.news slash Pacman. The link is in the description.

One of our sponsors today is the new book by George Koch called Bullies Parasites and Slaves. Bullies take from others to benefit themselves and they pretend to be our only defenders as a ploy to get our support. And the instant a bully doesn't need us, we become their next victims. We need to wise up and see this. Parasites are the people hiding behind titles and offices, subsidizing their wealth by ruthlessly underpaying everybody below them, like the CEO who makes more before lunch than you make in a year. And then there's the hybrid bully parasite king who sends the poor to war to conquer, to kill, to enrich himself and his friends.

That's what this book exposes and it really nails it. replacing exploitation with mutual care. You can get bullies, parasites, and slaves in paperback, ebook, or audio. You can even get it for free if you need. Go to BPS dot online or text my last name, Pacman to 511511. The link is in the description. Something very strange is happening with Donald Trump's right arm. And finally, this is getting some attention.

And if you've watched this program for a while, you know that I've been pointing out these exact glitches for years, these sudden movements, the strange jerking of the arm or shoulder. Sometimes these are like a body glitch. And I've never understood why this hasn't gotten more attention. And here's the reason. Whenever we interview a doctor about these clips, the reaction from the doctors is always, yeah, that's definitely something. That is a real movement.

You're right, David. You're seeing that. It's reasonable to say, what is causing that? But it hasn't really gotten into the mainstream. Finally, somebody is taking a closer look. Take a look at this. You can see Trump's right hand and arm suddenly twitch or jerk while he's standing there. And according to a new Daily Beast report published through Yahoo News, similar movements are now being regularly spotted by Trump.

at all sorts of events. And the person raising the alarm is Dr. John Paul Garrison, a clinical and forensic psychologist who comments publicly about the visible behavior of Donald Trump. And what Garrison did is looked at the footage from two recent appearances and said these are distinct spasms on one side. And he believes that these are involuntary physical movements. Now here is where we need to be careful as responsible people in the world. Garrison speculates that movements like these could be associated with neurological conditions. The category includes Parkinson's disease, Lewy body dementia, or damage following a stroke. Again, the topic of stroke kind of rears its head around Donald Trump.

Of course, we can't look at a few videos of Trump jerking and conclude that. include that Donald Trump has Parkinson's or dementia or brain damage or that he's had a stroke. But Garrison has not examined Trump in person. And from what he is seeing, believes that this is something. Now, could there be benign explanations? There could be. That's possible. What I am most interested in here is this accumulating pattern of unusual things that we're

seeing from an 80 year old obese president and that the almost. complete absence of meaningful transparency about his health makes it impossible to know what is really going on. Now, with all of these things, you know, we've we've talked about the bruising on Donald Trump's hands, for example. We've talked about the ankles swollen like tree trunks, which the White House has said, oh, that's chronic venous insufficiency. We've seen repeated episodes of slurred garbled speech and moments of confusion and Trump's inability to stay awake one, two, three, four times a week at public events. And for years, we've been showing you these strange physical glitches that never seem to generate

anywhere near the attention I believe that they deserved. Now, a couple of weeks ago, we spoke with a speech language, a pathologist who her interpretation is what's happening is those glitches. coincide with Trump messing up a word. And as Trump's brain immediately wants to try to correct the word, he sort of loses the ability to suppress these body movements. And that's why you see them. That was her idea, her interpretation. Garrison has a different interpretation and says that he noticed these spasms during a couple of recent appearances, including while Trump was listening to other people speak, which is a different scenario than he sort of

of glitched on a word, as I like to say, and then lost control of his bodily function. So Dr. Garrison's belief is this may be agitation. And the agitation could be while speaking and messing up a word or it could be while listening and being agitated because, you know, he's angry about having to listen to other people or whatever the case may be. Now, the White House, as you won't be surprised to hear that the White House has not responded to the Daily Beast's request for comment about the alleged spasms. And that's really the part that needs to change. We've got an 80-year-old president. If there is a harmless explanation for these movements, that's great.

Tell us what it is. And then we can move on. If his doctors evaluated these alleged spasms and said, oh, there's nothing concerning happening here, tell us that. If there's a medical issue affecting the president, I believe the American people deserve to know that. And their own standard when Joe Biden was president was that the American people deserve to know that. Although maybe what they meant was they deserve to know about it when it's Biden, but not when it is Trump. Now, what is most interesting, I'll admit that I have a personal interest in this. I've been asking about these glitches seven years.

I mean, I think by 2019, Donald Trump was doing this stuff when he would speak publicly, but it was very much associated when he go, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia. It was seemed always to coincide with a verbal glitch. And so it was hard for me as a layperson looking a video to separate what comes first. Is the physical glitch causing him to mess up his speech? Is the speech glitch causing him to twitch? I don't know. The great news is other people are finally asking about the exact same thing. We don't need random people on the internet diagnosing Trump. And I've been, I've made an effort. Sometimes I may slip, but I've made an effort to say, here is what my eyes and ears are showing me. I don't have the expertise to interpret it. We need doctors to interpret it. What we really need is Trump's doctors, not in a propagandistic, healthiest president ever, sort of a incredible doctor's notes sort of way, but in a sober and honest way to tell us

what exactly this is. And the thing that makes it even more notable is that almost every single day we're seeing something new, yet we're still finding ourselves asking questions about stuff that he's been doing what, doing for six, seven, eight years. We don't even have answers to the things from eight years ago. And new things are happening every day lately the sleeping. But what really set off a lot of the people in my audience was Donald Trump's physical appearance yesterday, which mostly I'm going to focus on.

what he said, but there is something weird about Donald Trump's appearance yesterday, and I want to talk about that next. A swollen Trump looked visibly ill yesterday, and it appears as though his handlers really have no more ways to hide that this is going on. They can't hide what's going on by limiting Trump's schedule. They can't hide what's going on by having Trump sitting at the resolute desk of the Oval Office when the press is allowed in. So he is not seen getting into the chair and visibly struggling in the way he increasingly does. They're doing everything they can. I encourage you to watch the entire appearance that the clips we're going to look at come from because Trump looks exhausted, repeatedly appears to fall asleep when he's awake. What is coming out of his mouth is completely

incoherent. Here is Donald Trump saying that they are making a big announcement medically. When you talk about medical and when you talk about dollars, this is a really big announcement. Thank you very much. This is to me a really big day. One of the biggest ever because this announcement is as big as it gets medically. I think it just can't get. Certainly when you talk about medical and dollars in the same sentence, it doesn't get bigger. From the standpoint of medical and from the standpoint of dollars, you really can't beat this.

is that? This is as big as it gets medically when you're talking about medical and dollars. He looks out of it. The sentence structure is like someone searching in real time for the words he needs to finish a thought and he just can't find them and he doesn't know what he's saying. And consider that this is an event specifically designed to be easy for Trump to showcase what they believe is a major accomplishment. and Donald Trump just cannot be coherent. Now, watch Trump while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is speaking, his secretary of health and human services. Trump drifts in and out of sleep for two straight minutes in a brightly lit room.

I've been in the Oval Office. It's lit like a TV studio. It's so bright. And RFK is rambling about prescription drugs and Trump's eyes close and his head dips. And he appears to rouse him. himself and come back around and then it happens again, take a look. Does these agreements cover nine out of the 10 drugs, nine out of 10 drugs that are used by Americans.

Well, this is going to have a dramatic impact on medical pricing and on health, public health in our country. Probably the biggest change in public health prior to this and as dwarfed by this announcement I was in 1962 when my uncle signed the amendment to the food drug and cosmetics act. And that signing was triggered by the thalidomide scandal. Thalidomide was a drug that was used widely in Europe and the rest of the world to treat morning sickness. It turned out it caused grotesque deformations. Tens of thousands of children were born without their limbs.

Our country was spared of that because I'm feeling. very courageous scientist named Francis Kelsey in FDA refused to allow the drug to be sold in this country. So we've now seen versions of this over and over again. And whatever the explanation is, it is not an image of boundless stamina and unfettered strength and girth and all of the things that Donald Trump and others have spent years trying to sell us. It's a guy who is struggling to remain awake during his own event.

at which he's supposedly touting and bragging about his great accomplishments. The math of the day then got really wacky as Trump went back to this idea of, I've cut the cost of drugs 400%, 500%, even 600%, of course, mathematically impossible. We've slashed the cost of dozens of commonly used medications and ultimately everything, all drugs, by price differences of 400, 500 and even 600 percent. Drug prices have gone down and we'll go down 50, 60, 70, 80 percent. There's never been an announcement like that.

It won't get covered. If it were a Democrat sitting here, it would be the biggest story in the last 20 years, but it won't get covered. But that's why I speak up. I have to speak up. And the people behind me speak up also. This is not really a show about fourth grade math. or even third or fourth grade math.

It's not, it's just not what the show is about. It's about algebra. No, it's not a show about fourth grade math. But if something costs $100 and you reduce the price by 100%, it's now free. You can't reduce the price by 400 or 500 or 600 percent. And Trump has said this over and over again. Sometimes he says 1,200 percent. We're cutting prescription drugs, 1,500 percent.

And it seems as though one of two things is happening. Nobody around him is capable of getting him to understand basic math or or people are too scared to tell him, sir, that doesn't make any sense. Or they tell him and he doesn't care. I guess that's the third possibility. On the topic of trade with our friend our friend in Canada, the country, Canada. Trump's new thing is we don't need their product. If we cut off trade, we make money. If we end trade with Canada, we make 40 billion.

What? Listen to him explain it. Again, you take certain countries, I don't want to mention any, but countries that you consider great, and they're paying a half a point, all right? A half a point. But they make $40 billion a year with the United States. If they don't make the $40 billion, and we don't need their product, doesn't have to, we really don't need their product. So if we cut off trade with that country, we just made $40 billion. And you do a few countries like that, and we become a big money machine.

we should have the lowest interest rates anywhere in the world. We should be lower than any country. It used to be that way 30 years ago. Think about the economic theory that Trump is inventing here. Every time America stops trading with another country, we make whatever we were previously importing from them. Follow that logic to its conclusion. And you would come to the conclusion that we would have infinite prospect.

if we imported nothing. The only little problem is then we would not have any of the things we import, many of which we can't make domestically. This is not how trade works, guys. We're not spending $40 billion on imports and therefore what in the sense that we pay $40 billion dollars, but we get $40 billion worth of stuff. Trump thinks if we simply stop spending the $40 billion, we've made $40 billion. But we stop spending the 40 billion.

We no longer have the 40 billion worth of stuff that we need. Trump then appears to be dozing off again while Howard Nutlick does his absurd kind of hype man routine about Trump. So the Commerce Department is involved because we want these companies to resure, right? Because reshoring produces national security, right? We need our drugs made in America. And then that brings jobs and investment in. America. So just this group, $19.6 billion today, just today, taking us to $638 billion of all the deals

that the president has made, $638 billion in just pharmaceuticals coming. So not only do you have the jobs, but you have the driving down the cost of drugs in America, right? We all talk about affordability. Drug costs are the number one cost, right? And you got to take your care of your family and the president is driving down this cost. So driving down costs today from all these companies. You now have 90% of the drugs covered. You've got building, building and jobs. And you're also protecting national security.

And here we go again. Howard Nutlick is doing this extraordinary suckup routine to Trump. And Trump can't even keep his eyes open when they're praising him. This makes the entire appearance much more than, oh, They caught him sleeping on a freeze frame for one second. No. You selectively edited. No.

You watched the event and the guy can't stay awake. He can't stay awake in a brightly lit room. He can't stay awake while his suckups are sucking up. He can't stay awake no matter what is going on. It is a problem. And this is not someone who is in any position to be running the country. Let's make him irrelevant at minimum by taking away Republican control of the House in November, if not also the Senate.

Most VPNs just don't give you the tools you need. If you care how your VPN connection works, our sponsor private internet access gives you control. Private internet access lets you do things like choose between wire guard and open VPN, customize your DNS, port forwarding. You can also adjust encryption and connection settings instead of being locked into the defaults. So it's perfect for people who want a VPN that you can custom configure. If you're not tech savvy, no problem. Private internet access is perfect for you too because by default, you can turn it on in one click and stay protected. No special knowledge required just works out of the

box. The biggest reason I trust private internet access with my data is there actually. are open source and they have a no log policy that's been tested in court many times where they simply don't have user activity logs to provide because they don't keep them. They're one of the few VPNs that can say that. One account works on unlimited devices, phone, laptop, tablet, router. You don't pay for separate accounts. My audience gets 83% off. So it's 203 a month plus four extra months for free.

Go to PIA VPN.com slash Pacman. The link is in the description. Here's something people don't think about enough. There is not much of a line between online privacy and real world safety. If someone gets angry at you in traffic, at work, in a relationship, or in a comment section, it can be very easy for them to figure out your details, address, phone number, A lot of that information is just sitting on public search databases right now. There is something you can do.

Our sponsor Incogni helps protect you and your family by automatically sending removal requests to hundreds of these databases and they are legally required to comply and get rid of your information. Incogni will follow up until it's done. Incogni's custom removals is my favorite feature. If I find information on a random directory. or an obscure business database or some new people search site. I just paste the link into Incogni.

Their privacy experts work to get it removed. Removing your information from these online databases is critical to protect yourself and your loved ones. Get 60% off when you go to incogni.com slash Pacman. Use the code Pacman. The link is in the description. Today I will be speaking with Darren Asemogamog. the Institute Professor of Economics at MIT and a co-winner of the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize

in Economic Sciences. His new book is what happened to liberal democracy remaking a politics of shared prosperity, a very timely discussion, I would say at this point where there's this sort of tension, in fact, within the Democratic Party as to whether there should be a move further to the left economically or not. So I really appreciate your time and the opportunity to talk about this. Thank you, David. It's my pleasure to be with you. So let's start with one of the main points of the book as I understand it, which is that some of the problems in liberal democracy today are not problems, you argue, born of cultural backlash, but rather that they are structural problems

inherent to liberal democracy. Can you outline that case that you make for us? Well, I think the way I put it is that you cannot understand liberal democracy's crisis without recognizing that we've transitioned from an industrial society to a post-industrial society, but also that in this post-industrial society, liberalism became a much more dominant ideology. Many liberal ideas were developed in the context of authoritarian regimes, conservative regimes, monarchies. So liberalism was in opposition and now it's closer to the establishment. But many of the issues that were very thorny for liberalism, including dealing with the problem of inclusion in heterogeneous societies, how to deal with intolerance, how to structure

educational institutions so that they are consistent with liberal values but also provide civic education supporting liberal values. All of those were in the background when liberalism was in opposition and became central issues when liberalism became the establishment. But at the same time, liberal democracy started changing itself because society was changing. Most importantly, inequality that we have seen explored in the United States is very much linked to the nature of post-industrial society, digital technologies and globalization being among the chief reasons. And how to deal with that was both complex, but also different in terms of how you would create conditions. for shared prosperity in an industrial society. But at the same time, also the coalition supporting liberal ideas changed,

in particular from broader coalitions that included centrally the working class, to one that has at its center the college-educated, more urbanized, globalized groups in society. And that's created another rift which touches both the issue of shared prosperity and inequality, also cultural politics. What are the specific ways in which modern liberal democracies you feel don't go far enough? I think not going far enough is a loaded term. Okay. Because it's sort of somehow makes it sound like we know which direction we have to go in. Right. So the way that I would put it is that we have not grappled with how to create shared prosperity and true democratic

participation in a post-industrial society. The true and tested way of building wage growth, which was essential for shared prosperity, was through the workings of the labor market under democratic governance and the labor movement trade unions, but it centrally depended on companies that innovated and invested, needing labor and wanting to hire that labor, and in that democratic environment, the only way they could do that is by offering higher wages. And that activated a very powerful channel for shared prosperity,

whereby wages start increasing for all sorts of different skills and occupations. and that underpins the most powerful form of shared prosperity you can imagine. With digital technologies, people in administrative, managerial, technical occupations started seeing greater opportunities for them, and those were the college-educated workers. But even more powerfully, digital technologies became a platform for automation, meaning more of the work going to capital and algorithms rather than labor, especially in tasks previously performed by lower skilled or middle skill workers, like blue-collar workers or office workers.

And that severed the link between business expansion and shared prosperity. And not going far enough, if I'm going to agree with you, would be we didn't really question how to rebuild shared prosperity in this age of digital technologies. But there are also ways in which perhaps liberal democracy went too far, and that's concerning issues of culture and the form of relationship between the more educated and less educated segments of society. Give us an example of that, of culture going too far. I think going back to the dilemmas of liberalism from the beginning, the issue of how to deal with intolerance, especially in a society, in societies, because this is common across pretty much all

advanced nations in Europe, North America, and so on, was how to sort of create shared values around inclusion. And rather than build that, I think the sort of the center left that that became much more grounded on the college educated, better educated segments of society, tried to impose its values on the rest of society, creating huge backlash,

but also going against some of the promises of liberal ideas based on self-government and so on. So in particular, you see this everywhere in the West, center-left parties, which had their, support base among the working class, the lower educated segments, trade unions, started becoming almost entirely reliant on votes by urbanized, college-educated groups. But it's also coincided

with those groups culturally diverging further and further away from more working-class, lower education communities around the country in the United States or around the countries such as the UK or France and Germany. And those conflicts needed to be resolved in a more compromise-based fashion, and that's what failed to happen. In terms of where we are right now, so that then that allows us to talk about where we would want to go, are you in agreement that, and I'll explain what I mean by this, but are you in agreement that right now, the most successful societies we see, are liberal democracies in the style of of, you know, if we look at like HDI Plus, human development index plus as a measurement tool or whatever,

it's places like Denmark and Sweden and Norway, et cetera. Like these are liberal democracies. They are capitalist with more regulation. Like, are we on the same page as far as that goes? Yeah, absolutely. 100%. Okay. But when you look at those societies, there's also a lot of heterogeneity.

So some of the same problems that. I'm highlighting in the book are much more visible in Sweden than, say, in Denmark or Switzerland. So there are actually lessons to be learned there. And part of it is, again, about how these problems of inclusion and creating bridges between the working class and the college-educated segments have been handled. And there are no silver bullets when it comes to this. But for example, the Swiss sort of more participatory democracy style has really diffused some of those tensions. And Denmark took early action in sort of bolstering shared prosperity, but while at the same time dealing with some of the discontent around immigration in a much more effective fashion than, say, for example,

Sweden. So I think those are sort of giving us examples of where different divergences happening. And so to dig into that a little bit. And I actually, I researched that to a degree for my first book, which some call it the heterogeneity myth. In other words, they try to say, there's nothing to the idea that those societies are more successful because they are more heterogeneous. And then others say, no, that is that is actually exactly why they are more successful. When the population is more heterogeneous, there is implicitly more social trust, for example, et cetera, because people see themselves and others. It does seem interesting that over time, some of those countries have become more diverse,

sort of by the traditional metrics, I guess we would say. What percentage of the population was born outside the country, for example, et cetera. But it seems as though in my research, like the size of the effect is relatively modest. Is there an exhibit? Give me your sense of the size of the effect. Economically, I think the story is very complex. Okay. So economically, there is very little evidence that immigration into the United States, for example, has led to a big negative economic impact on the native-born population. Right.

There is some evidence, pretty good evidence, that U.S. benefiting from immigrants with entrepreneurial ideas, scientific qualifications, or other sort of different perspectives have actually enriched the country. On the other hand, the evidence is also pretty overwhelming that in the U.S. and in Europe, immigration has always led to cultural clashes. So that's why you have to sort of deal with these different tensions. Added to that, you can also say, and people emphasize this a lot, the birthplace of social democracy Scandinavia, Denmark, Sweden, then Norway, were remarkably at homogeneous. So that's why when I talk of working class liberalism, I view that as a new governing philosophy that will achieve for post-industrial and more diverse societies

what social democracy attempted and achieved for more homogeneous industrial societies. When you say working class liberalism, I think sometimes that evokes this imagery of post-World War to 1950s factory workers or something like that, which of course is not what you mean because you're talking about it in the context of how economies and technology have advanced. What does it look like? Is there a model? Is there a candidate that talks about this in terms you think accurately reflect your view of that?

I'm not sure that any candidate is where I would want them to be. Okay. Because, again, my hope is that this will be an emerging governing philosophy, and I'm not claiming that I have the answer. I'm hoping to contribute to it, and the sort of the ideological, philosophical, and coalitional contours of that may be quite different. But there is clearly a difference between some Democrats who try to talk of a big tent versus those that are more sort of in terms of us versus the enemy.

And, you know, I see the point of sometimes pinpointing enemies. FDR did that in his heyday while building a broad coalition. It sort of can create shared ideas or share solidarity. But if you divide society too much, especially in our polarized age, I think that's dangerous, especially for liberal ideas, which do need to provide ample freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of engagement in politics for all groups. So demonizing one group at the expense of others is not. necessarily going to get us there. So I think, for instance, John Ossoff is typically choosing

a more inclusive language when he's trying to even talk about issues that are difficult within the context of American politics, such as universal health care. I agree. That I think is a good starting point. What do you think about, or let me ask it in a different way, the, And I'm going to use these terms assuming the people that identify this way know what they mean by it. And these are accurate terms. Do you believe that the socialists and the communists that want to pull the Democratic Party to the left? Are there specific ideas they bring to the table that you think are good ideas that should be considered in this working class liberalism direction that you're encouraging?

Well, first of all, I think the label of social. I don't know that many powerful groups within the Democratic Party are using the label communist. No. But obviously the Democratic Socialists of America is using the label socialist. I think that means different things to different people within that coalition. Right. Just recently, the head of the DSA made another series of very explosive statements. But I think typically Mamdani,

is a little bit more measured. AOC is more measured recently. Bernie Sanders, I think, is definitely very different on some of these issues than, say, New York liberals. So there is a lot of heterogeneity there. And they do bring one very, very important thing, which is the need for speaking to the people about their economic grievances

and being relatively, radical and central on that issue. And you see the success of that in Mamdani added to it with his brilliant charisma. It sort of brought him from nowhere to perhaps the most famous democratic politician right now in the country. But that's not enough. I think we need two other things, and for that the socialist label may or may not be a barrier, but I suspect that. I suspect that. maybe. One is that whoever is running for national office needs to speak not just to people in New York or Boston, but to those in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Mississippi. And that requires a different language. And it also requires much more care on some of the issues that I've talked about,

which is how to deal with the cultural grievances of some of those communities. communities. Second, it also requires commitments that are sustainable and will deliver what they promise because people will be attracted to some of the ideas of the progressive left because it's promising to deal and reverse the huge inequalities that have opened up in our society. Affordability could be a fine word for it. I have no problem with it. Inequality, whatever you want to call it. Jobs, I think it's the one that really resonates with a lot of communities, jobs and wages. But if you promise that you're going to fix that and your policies fall flat, that's not good. Because it further erodes trust in institutions and the establishment and in the center left.

So that's why I think, you know, Mamdani, for example, should think bigger than you know, subsidize transport and state run grocery stores. I don't think those are up to the task of dealing with the affordability or inequality challenges that we're facing right now. One last thought before I let you go. When I hear you talk about candidates that sort of reflect people's grievances back to them in a way that's emotionally salient, more my language than the language you used, Trump sort of did that, especially in the least. lead up to his first term. I mean, I think his solutions, he claimed expertise he didn't have. His proposed solutions were never going to work. But I do think that that was an important factor

in pulling in people who had never voted before by saying, hey, I understand you're getting screwed. It's brown people from Mexico and China, right? Which is a, a diagnosis I don't agree with. But it seems that he did achieve the emotional statement. Absolutely. One understand. So yeah. Trump was a brilliant populist. Right. Why, I don't understand fully, because, you know, he comes from a milieu that has very little overlap with the actual grievances of the working people. But he did capture that. And using language that will resonate with those people is very, very important. After all, you're trying to appeal to them.

The problem is that, of course, Trump and more generally the authoritarian rights, or the populist right has no workable solutions. Nigel Farage in the UK, Marine Le Pen in France, Trump or J.D. Vance in the United States. They're not going to solve these problems. They're going to make that worse. They're going to make them worse.

So that's number one. Second, Trump's most effective communication was polarizing. And that's what I was trying to. trying to hint at that sometimes polarizing language may be expedient. Yes. But it's not productive for the long run because if you're going to have liberal democracy work, you do need to build bridges, you do need to leverage shared moral values, you do need to bring people together, and you do need to form a big tent broad coalition.

You can't do that with the kind of approach that Trump, example, So we should not learn from Trump those things. But obviously, understanding where the grievances are and sort of using that for the correct messaging is important. The book is What Happened to Liberal Democracy, Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity. We've been speaking with the book's author, Professor Duran Asimoglu, really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much. Thank you, David. It was my pleasure.

Hey, if you're hearing this, that means you're listening to our podcast on one of the many podcast networks that we stream to. And first, I just want to say, thank you for being a listener of this show. It really means a lot that you're tuning in here. I would love to ask you for a quick favor. We are so close to reaching four million subscribers on YouTube. YouTube is where we post everything you get through the audio podcast and a lot more stuff. It would mean a lot to me if you took a quick second to pop over to YouTube, search up the David

Packman Show, and hit subscribe. Every bit helps. I would love to have you as a subscriber there. Donald Trump has somehow found another issue where Democrats and Republicans increasingly agree with each other. And Trump has decided that his response is basically going to be, you're all idiots and I'm right and I know more than you do. And the reason I think this matters is because the best.

backlash that we're seeing against data centers is happening in communities all across the country. It's happening in left-leaning communities and right-leading communities. It's happening in cities and it's happening in suburban and in rural areas. And this is all, of course, data centers being built to power the AI boom. Now, Donald Trump posted this extraordinary message about this issue on truth social, where he said, quote, the only reason that communities throughout the USA should not want data centers, is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let data

rain. The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the golden goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti-data center movement. Actually, they can't believe it's happening. Now, if this were some progressive and environmental movement against AI infrastructure. Politically, you could understand what Trump is doing.

But that is not at all what is happening here because opposition to these massive data centers is bipartisan increasingly. We've talked about the concerns of Democrats and we've talked about the concerns of Republicans. Now, Democrats tend to raise concerns about the electricity demands, water usage, environmental effects, the possibility that ordinary rate payers could end up subsidizing. the infrastructure that's needed for some of these super rich tech companies. Why should they pay for it? So that's been what we've heard from Democrats.

But Republicans are also angry about this stuff. And if you go and you talk to people in the more conservative parts of the country, they're against data center projects over electricity prices. Remember, Trump promised to bring energy down by 50%. They don't like the noise. They don't like the land use. They don't like the water consumption. And many more conservative-leaning.

folks are also against the industrialization of areas where people just want, you know, pristine land and the freedom to put whatever they want rather than be fighting with data centers. And this has become kind of enough of a political problem that even J.D. Vance is acknowledging it now, who said the following about data centers. On AI, President Trump today said that Americans should get on board with wanting more data centers, how do you think that message goes over for the ahead of the midterms where this is becoming kind of a touch point in some areas? Well, what the president said about data centers is they're an important part of the

AI economy. When people build them, they have to build the power plants along with the data centers. I think probably 99% of the backlash to data centers has come in areas where building a data center means higher utility and higher electricity for the people on the ground. So I think what these companies have to do is take it advantage of some of the federal deregulatory efforts that we've undertaken. If you build the data center, you should be putting power back into the grid, not taking it out. And if that is happening, I don't think the data centers are that controversial.

It's when the utility bills get so much higher, that's when it's a real problem. All right, guys, we'll see you all the other side. Take care of you. Notice the big if in that statement. If they aren't taking power out of the grid, that is exactly one of the big concerns that people have. Data centers need massive amounts of electricity and the AI build out is happening so fast that communities are asking a very reasonable question.

Who's going to pay for all of this stuff? Trump's answer is stop complaining or you're going to be poor. And this is also where Donald Trump's political instincts are becoming really interesting. Check out the reaction from some of Donald Trump's own people to. to this entire data center situation. And you will very quickly see that many of them are really angry. No data centers. What about our water supply?

I regret ever supporting you. Horrendous messaging. I'd rather have clean water and less surveillance. Perhaps better messaging is in order. The point is those are MAGA people that are furious with this. So I think that there's a broader lesson here overall. and the people around him have gone fully all in on the AI infrastructure boom. His administration wants investment.

The technology companies want data centers. The investors financing the build out obviously want data centers. And I am willing to concede or stipulate there is a national interest argument for building AI infrastructure in the US and not letting China dominate the technology. That's all cool. I'm good with all of that. None of that means that every proposed data center is automatically good for the community where someone wants to put it.

And it certainly doesn't mean that residents should just shut up about their electric bills and their water supply and the noise or what gets built next to their homes. Now, politically, Trump is insulting a lot of these people. And that seems very stupid, especially when they're up against a really difficult midterm election. Trump is not talking about, you know, there's this hypothetical group of blue-haired San Francisco environmentalists that's angry with me, but who cares? I don't need them anyway. Some of the people saying, I do not want this enormous data center in my community are people who voted for Donald

Trump. They live in deeply Republican areas. And what they're seeing is these super rich companies and tech investors pursue projects in their communities, while the supposed populist president who would always watch out for them is saying, hey, if you're against this stuff, you're backwards and you're choosing to stay poor. So there's a reason that Republican and Democratic elected officials are saying it is really dangerous to allow this stuff to go forward. The politics of AI are changing really quickly. People may like chat GPT and Claude and Gemini.

They might like making AI generated images. They might understand, oh, AI is going to be important for American competitiveness because we all say we're not going to use it and everybody else does, they're just going to crush us. That may be all stuff that people believe. That doesn't mean you want your electricity bill going up to power someone else's trillion dollar AI race. It doesn't mean they want a massive industrial facility dropped into their community. So Trump would be smarter to acknowledge those concerns and say, hey, listen, we don't want

to fall behind. These companies must demonstrate their projects will benefit the communities. It's not going to be random taxpayers footing the bill, et cetera. And instead, he's telling the people who don't want them, you're backwards, you're poor or you're going to be poor, and it'll be your fault and also you're helping China. And increasingly, the people he's insulting are his own voters. So this seems very dangerous and very risky. Democrats must take advantage of it.

Two of the biggest opportunities right now are figure out messaging on data centers that is inclusive and brings in centrist and Republican voters and create a serious, credible, anti-corruption platform that will appeal to people across the political spectrum. Democrats should be doing that. I can't really say that they're doing it successfully for now. I want to show you something that completely changes the way we should think about Russian influence operations. When people hear Russian bots, I think they still imagine.

a guy in a basement with 50 fake Twitter accounts posting memes. And that doesn't even begin to describe what we are talking about here. Take a look at these documents that became public as part of a federal court case involving alleged Russian influence operations. This is essentially a professional marketing plan. Look at what they call the meme factory. They are not randomly making memes and hoping something goes viral. These are documents that describe producing 200 pieces of meme content a month designed around topics

relevant to the audiences that they're targeting. And then there's what they call the commenting machine. We've experienced this. And this plan calls for 100,000 comments a month on Facebook and Twitter. And look at how they describe the purpose. They're not saying, oh, we're going to promote some narratives or something like that. They are talking about these as targeted psychological attacks based on informational trends, based on people's attitudes, based on an analysis of user behavior. Then they have fake video clips, fake documents, fake private messages.

They have an entire category called augmented reality, which are fabricated materials intended to misinform people and provoke emotional reactions. This is a deep understanding of how these digital algorithms work. And maybe the most sophisticated part is what they call sleeper communities. The proposal is create social media pages that look like legitimate regional news organizations and then do nothing obviously pro-Russian with them for a while. Instead, they spend months building an authentic audience. They use targeted advertising. They put out content people want.

And once those pages have gained weight, that's the term they use, then they start pushing stuff that's more favorable to Russia. And then they start putting out the disinformation. Think about how sophisticated this is. You could follow a local news account for six months. They give you weather. They give you local stories. They give you sports, stuff you like.

You have no reason to believe there's any connection to Russia. And when the timing is right, the information starts changing a little bit. at the American operation. They explicitly identify swing state residents as targets. They want to get in front of people in Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. They separately say, we also want stuff to target Hispanic Americans, American Jews, gamers, Reddit users, people on 4chan. And they even establish political objectives. For example, they want to increase the percentage of Americans who believe the U.S. is doing a little too much for Ukraine and we should really support ending the war, even if Ukraine has to give up a little bit of territory to Russia. Which president

does that sound like? This is audience segmentation on a sophisticated level. It's message testing. It's content production. It's paid acquisition. It's psychological profiling. I've actually been briefed about this stuff because someone, as someone with a large political audience, I've been told you could be the target of an operation like this. And the point isn't someone will call and go, hey, David, I'm from Russia. Would you repeat some propaganda? The point is you wouldn't know where the information originated. And that's what brings me to Donald Trump.

I constantly hear some version of Trump could never unwittingly fall for Russian propaganda. He's too smart for that. Trump is not that smart. Of course he could fall for it. And maybe the most important thing is you don't need to be stupid to fall for an operation that is engineered so that the target doesn't know where the information come from. So Trump might see something from an account he trusts. Maybe somebody he trusts saw it and told him.

And a narrative circulates very widely. And it's like everybody knows X, Y, Z. Nobody realizes it was all seated by Russian propaganda networks. And that's really the point. You think you're following local news. You think you're laughing at a meme. You think you're reading, you know, another American's comment or that an idea emerged organically because it's a good idea.

And it didn't. So we've got to forget this image of the obvious Russian bots and Trump meeting with Putin. And Putin goes, here's what I want you to do. What we're seeing in these documents is something so far above in sophistication from what some people believe exists, they are trying to manufacture the informational environment itself. And a lot of the basic media literacy skills that I talk about in my forthcoming book, pay attention, help to insulate you or inoculate you, maybe is the better word, from falling for this stuff.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that some of these operations are not so sophisticated that most people would fall for them. There's some really sophisticated stuff. But the way we end up in a lot of these informational silos, the way we end up getting from the feeds what they perceive we want, even when we believe we want something different, you've got to understand that. So I hope you've preordered my forthcoming book. Pay attention.

October 3rd, I will be in Springfield, Massachusetts at the Springfield Book Forum with Jessica Tarlov. We'll be speaking about our books. We'll both be signing books. I believe the event is at six, but just Google. David Pakman, Jessica Tarlov, Springfield Book Forum, October 3rd. You should be able to get the info. You can pre-order signed copies of the book at Davidpackman.com slash attention. I will see you on the bonus show. And we will, of course, be back tomorrow with a brand new program.