The David Pakman Show - Trump scrambles to escape Epstein fallout as ICE descends into misery

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

-- On the Show -- Josh Gay from Ring of Fire fills in for David. Check out his work at https://www.youtube.com/@TheRingofFire -- Megyn Kelly has a sit-down softball interview that rebrands JD Vance as a calm, “reasonable” MAGA heir, laundering the same extremist agenda without Trump’s volatility -- Donald Trump bulldozes an NBC interview with Tom Llamas, openly fantasizing about commandeering taxpayer money and dodging Epstein questions with rambling deflections -- A deep dive into a Cato Institute study blows up Trump’s immigration narrative, showing even conservative data proves immigrants generate trillions in surplus and strengthen the economy -- A DOJ attorney overwhelmed with 90 immigration cases told a federal judge the system “sucks," as courts accuse the Trump administration of brazenly ignoring lawful orders -- Trump’s grip on young men is weakening as economic stress, broken promises, and growing disillusionment replace the anger-driven appeal that helped him win them in 2024 -- On the Bonus Show: Trump instituting loyalty tests, ShamWow guy running for Congress, TPUSA's alternate Super Bowl halftime show with Kid Rock makes no sense, and much more... 👕 American Giant: Get 20% off your first order with code PAKMAN at https://american-giant.com 🛌 Helix Sleep mattresses: Get 20% OFF sitewide at https://helixsleep.com/pakman ✉️ StartMail: Get 50% OFF for a year subscription at https://startmail.com/pakman -- Become a Member: https://davidpakman.com/membership -- Subscribe to our (FREE) Substack newsletter: https://davidpakman.substack.com -- Get David's Books: https://davidpakman.com/echo -- TDPS Subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow -- David on Bluesky: https://davidpakman.com/bluesky -- David on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow (00:00) Megyn Kelly launders JD Vance(12:57) Trump steamrolls NBC interview(22:35) Cato study shreds immigration myth(40:52) DOJ chaos in immigration courts(47:28) Trump losing young men   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bet mode activated. The scorebed app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news. Yeah, hey, who should I take in the Boston game? Well, statistically speaking. Nah, no more statistically speaking. I want hot takes. I want knee-jerk reactions. That's not really what I do. Is that because you don't have any knees?

Or... The score bet. Trusted sports content, seamless sports betting. Download today. 19 plus, Ontario only. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you, please go to conicsonterio.ca. Well, another day, another disastrous interview for Donald Trump.

And this time, this orange demigod sitting down with NBC's Tom Yamis. And I'll get to that in just a second. But yesterday was a special day in Trump world for all of us. Because while Trump was out there, lashing out at reporters and threatening the world metaphorically, he was soaking the world and gasoline holding the lighter. J.D. Vance was sitting down with Megan Kelly in what they are calling an interview. I didn't see it as an interview per se. I saw it more as, I don't know, a primer, a primer for a Vance presidency. And that's where I'm starting today. I'm starting today by talking about

J.D. Vance and this interview with Megan Kelly. And I know everybody's going to already start thinking it. Why are you talking about J.D. Vance up front when Trump is spiraling. He's threatening war. He's attacking elections. He's embarrassing our entire country. And that's a fair question because J.D. Vance has just been a wet blanket out there this whole time. But the answer that we are looking at today is that first, J.D. Vance, he's just as magacentric as Donald Trump. The same policies, the same instincts, the same cruelty, the same beliefs. But the difference is that J.D. Vance is polished. He's delivering the same message without all the chaos, without the spectacle, without the necrotic hands. And for me, that makes him much more dangerous in the long term.

And how does that play into everything? To me, it goes right to what's happening in November, the midterm elections. November 2026, we're seeing it right now. Trump is getting crushed in the polls. David's talking about the blue wave that's ahead. And I see it too. And the hope from Republicans is that someone like Vance can carry Trump's message without all the Stephen Miller lunacy

and send that person the JD Vance character out on the campaign trail and frankly beyond 2026 this is a tryout for 2028 we saw Trump talk about a Vance Rubio ticket and frankly I don't even know if Trump's going to make it to the end of his term

so we may see a J.D. Vance presidency even sooner so what do they do? They parade out this puff piece audition interview and it seems like it's a great way to get Vance off and running out in front of the masses and look before I get any further into this let me be clear Megan Kelly didn't interview J.D. Vance she didn't challenge him she didn't force him to reconcile any of his contradictions she didn't call him to task on anything he said instead this was more of a presentation, a coming out party, if you will, for J.D. Vance. And look, don't take my word for it.

Let's listen to exactly how Megan Kelly herself describes this sit-down interview. I'll say my one observation that I wanted to share with you before we go. I'll try to raise this tomorrow, too, if I remember, is just how different he is. He'll talk about anything. Nothing's off limits, like he went from subject to subject with ease. Think of our last vice president and how stilted she was on everything. Of course, Kamala Harris has entered the picture. Okay, all right, go on, Megan. It was like her weird transgressions into Venn diagrams and burdens and stuff. Like, this guy was like, boom, boom, boom, he could make jokes, you make fun of himself. He could get serious. He could talk in-depth on policy. He could, you know, be funny about

Don Lemon and so on. It's just these, I'm not even sure these two are like the same species. She, she's like an alien being who doesn't totally understand the English language. I miss her. I'm not going to lie. I kind of hope she gets the nomination and that we get to see those two debate. But in any event, what a difference. I mean, come on, she sounds like she's swooning. After like a first date, he's different. He's funny. And meanwhile, Kamala Harris is described as an alien being who doesn't totally understand the English language.

That's something. I mean, it's coming right from a movement led by a man who doesn't understand the Constitution, much less the English language. So what exactly is in this interview? that had Megan Kelly gushing over J.D. Vance. And look, it certainly wasn't details. It wasn't policy analysis. It wasn't outcomes or consequences that come with a potential candidates interview.

It was all window dressing. It was about trying to make sure that J.D. Vance can sound calm. He can sound reasonable. Like the adult in the room. He can sound presidential. And that's the test here. That's the entire performance. It exists in stark contrast with what's happening in the real world.

Look, if Megan Kelly were a credible journalist, she would have pressed Vance on even the least popular MAGA positions. Yeah, flirting with war, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Greenland, threatening our allies in Europe, cozing up to Russia. American citizens being detained and disappeared and violating their first, second, fourth, fifth amendment rights all shredded. You've got Trump flirting with nationalizing elections, raiding the election offices in Georgia. And you have a sitting president linked to extremely damning documents involving horrific crimes against children. In any other world, just one of those issues shuts everything down. Here, they turned it into a yuck fest, chuckling, smiling, softball framing. I mean, that's all it was.

They were humanizing this regime. I mean, look, she brought up a lot of these topics, but J.D. gave total non-answers, and Megan would happily accept these answers as if they're the truth. And look, I'll say this. I'll give J.D. Vance's flowers. He's good at walking a careful tightrope. He's good at this.

He's a chameleon. He adapts to whatever his audience is, and he adapts to whoever's going to reward him the most. That's why he's the way he's the way. the vice president. He has zero fixed beliefs. And it actually reminded me of one of my favorite words in the English language. And it's a politician who is shrewd, but really has no beliefs. It's called a snolly goster. So we've got snolly goster vance out there knowing that he's got to be the one that carries MAGA to win in 2026 and to win in 28. And so what does he do? He validates

his base, but he distances himself from the chaos and the consequences of the president. Well, the president said very clearly, Putin should not have invaded Ukraine. We're going to try to work and bring that to an end, but there might be some areas of cooperation, too. His attitude is not, you're our friend, you're our enemy, we're going to go to war with our enemies, and we're going to be, you know, we're going to give our friends everything without asking questions. His attitude is we're about alliances. And you could have a country where we have a 90% aligned interest, but we're going to disagree on 10% of issues. Meanwhile, we may disagree with Russia on a lot, but when we agree on some things,

And I do think that is a fundamental reorientation. I mean, listen to that. Listen to what he's saying. He's talking about a war where Russia invaded Ukraine. And Vance is talking about it, softening it up to make it a disagreement. And look, he goes on to talk about immigration the same way. Because if you look, even in very blue places, like Memphis, Tennessee or a number of other cities, you see the system working as it should. An immigration officer goes in, arrest an illegal alien, that person gets processed and deported.

And if, God forbid, you have a mob forming, the ICE officers can call the local police and say, hey, these guys are threatening us. They're harassing us. They're maybe even assaulting us. Again, instead of the Stephen Miller cruelty, you're getting this administrative inconvenience. He makes this sound like paperwork, these deportations, the acts of ICE and the DHS. he's making it sound like an administrative task. He's making morality into efficiency. And that's exactly how you normalize this extremism. And Megan Kelly, she's not doing anything.

A real journalist would have stopped him right there and asked him why the mob was forming. And we don't ever get that question. Instead, we get these chummy questions like what happened with Don Lemon. Listen, listen to this. We mentioned the press a minute ago. Someone who claims to be a member of it is Don Lemon, who's been arrested now. The dumbest man in television. Yeah, I mean that, and that's saying something. He's under arrest because he stormed a church in the middle of a Sunday service,

along with a lot of other rioters and disrupted people trying to worship. He's trying to cloak himself in the First Amendment saying this is an attack on freedom of the press. And you say what? Well, I say first, Don. No one's object. to you standing outside of a church and protesting. No one's objecting to you to, no one's saying you can't protest the Trump administration's immigration policies or frankly our policies on anything else. What you cannot do is go into somebody's house of worship and prevent them from exercising their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. I don't even know what to say. They're brushing aside his credentials, just making fun of Don Lemon openly and

making fun of him being a journalist. That's extremely rich coming from Megan Kelly, especially in this situation. She's exhibiting exactly what she's accusing Don Lemon of. And look, personally, I watched the whole thing. I wasn't impressed. But I understand why it sells. I do. I understand why J.D. Vance is getting paraded out there. Trump's poll numbers are sliding. Every press conference is absolute chaos. J.D. Vance? makes that chaos feel more manageable. It's a lot less truth, social rants from 3 a.m. And a lot more press release, a lot more presidential.

So, look, why does this matter? Why does this little interview with Megan Kelly matter right now? Because J.D. Vance, to me, is a bigger threat to the United States than Trump is in the long term. And it matters now because we're going to see a lot more of J.D. Vance, especially between now in November, and then especially once the filing deadlines come, and then once the primaries are over. Because J.D. Vance is going to be the voice carrying the MAGA message to the masses. And look, yes, a blue wave is possible. And like David says, only if we make it happen. We've got to consider. November's not going to be a fair fight. Mail-in voting attacks, the Postal Service

sabotage, postmark manipulation, we've got election office raids, we've got the militarization and nationalization of elections being talked about. The Trump regime knows that these stances aren't popular. So instead of trying to persuade voters, they're trying to intimidate us and exhaust us. And J.D. Vance is just the window dressing. So to me, how do we combat this? How do we fight against this normalization that we're going to see from the Trump administration and J.D. Vance. How do we win in November? And it's pretty simple. We've seen it work so far. You start local. You call your representatives. You write letters. You show up to town halls. You keep their atrocities like the Epstein files and the videos of citizens being stripped of their rights and stripped of their

lives visible. You keep them in front of them and you make the outrage unavoidable because Trump's way, it doesn't win in the long term. And when he starts questioning the election legitimacy again, he's going to be at war with Republicans who aren't loyal enough. And that fracture is where we are going to take over and win. Now, ironically, later in that same day, we got Donald Trump on display. We saw J.D. Vance. And then we saw an interview with a network that's not supposed to be as cozy. It's not Fox News. It's not Megan Kelly.

It's not Newsmax. But you can still tell that legacy media like NBC is afraid of Donald Trump. So on this NBC interview, Trump absolutely bulldozes Tom Yamis using the interview just like he would on any of his campaign speeches. And look, I could do an entire show on all of the unhinged things he said in this interview. But there's two moments in particular that I want to highlight. The first is this IRS lawsuit, this $10.5 billion lawsuit against the IRS. I want you to listen carefully, very carefully, about what Donald Trump says his own DOJ is going to do and then where this money ends up. There's a new lawsuit by you and your family that you're suing the IRS for $10.5 billion for leaking your tax documents.

Is this a good use of taxpayer money? You can't leak documents. And any money that I win, I'll give it to charity, 100% to charities. Charities that will be approved by government or whatever. I have another lawsuit with the United States. I sued because they broke into Mar-a-Lago. But that's taxpayer money. It's going to take out of the system.

I know it's going to charity you're going to say. And I've won that case. I mean, virtually, they broke in the FBI illegally Biden and his group. It wasn't Biden. He didn't know what he was doing. It was Biden. It wasn't Biden. He didn't know what he was doing. But that's not the problem here. The problem here is where the money is coming from and where it goes. It was a group of very smart, radical love people. They're very smart. They've lost their way. And they broke into Maralago. They broke into my home.

They went through my wife's drawers. They went through, you know, that's a double meaning. They went through barons, my sons, everything. They went through the whole house. Stop here real quick. Really classy, joking about his wife's drawers. come on. I mean, absolutely unhinged. All right. Keep rolling. Hundreds of people, they went in with guns. They went on guns.

How would this work? How would have been a blazing? Wait, wait, wait. I brought a lawsuit. Essentially, the lawsuit's been won. I guess I want a lot of money. Scott Besson is the head of the IRS. What I want to do is ahead of the Justice Department. They're going to defend the IRS against you. You're the boss.

Well, there's never been anything like it. In all fairness. So are you going to tell to pay you? Don't forget, I sued as a private citizen because I sued between terms. I won three times. I won three times, but I didn't assume, unfortunately for this country,

I didn't assume office the second day, but here's the sorry. I sued because they broke into Maralaga. That was before I became president. Now it goes along and it turned out that the suit is a very strong suit. You're going to tell them to pay you though? Because you're the boss.

Well, what I would do, tell them to pay me, but I'll give 100% of the money to change. charity. I don't want any of that money. You take it out of the system. So look, Trump is openly saying 10 and a half billion dollars in tax money will go to charity or whatever from the treasury where it should be to wherever Trump decides. We have deficits all over. We can't pay for the basic needs of this country because of his his ICE actions, his DHS actions. And yet now he wants to take 10 and a half billion dollars from taxpayers. and just put it out into a charity that really no one's going to account for.

It's the Trump crime family out in the open. And then this interview gets even worse to me because the Epstein questions came at the end of the interview. And frankly, Trump brought it up himself. And look, with Caitlin Collins, we saw Trump snap at her talking about her smile. With Yamas, we get this. they asked me a question yesterday at the press conference about Clinton because of the testimony, the Epstein thing, which turned out that I have nothing to do. And they did about Epstein. And they said, do you think it's terrible? What, you know, with the subpoenas and everything, and they're

disobeying the subpoenas? And I actually said it's a shame. You have an ex-president and you have, you know, the president's wife and secretary of state. And I said it's a shame. It is a shame. Okay, standard line. He says he had nothing to do with it, but the Clintons did. All right, keep going. It is a shame. NBC News broke the story today. I don't know if you saw it, that the Democrats are already saying, if you bring President Bill Clinton and he has to testify, we're bringing President Trump. What do you say to that? I think they might say that, you know, but they've already brought me. See, I've been brought. They had me indicted many, many times. So he swats this idea away, like attempting a thing. coup somehow immunizes him from crimes against children.

And when impeachment comes up, he brags about his success. But notice what he did. He walked away from the allegations right away. He went from being asked about Clinton's involvement with the Epstein files to immediately talking about how unfair the Democrats treated him, how he was impeached twice. That has nothing to do with the Epstein files. All right, let's see what else he has to say. Many, many times. They didn't do that.

Do you think if the Democrats win in the midterms, at least one House of Congress, they're going to try to impeach you? Well, you know, I've done a great job as president. They say I've had the best first year of any president in history, and I think I have. If you look, I settle eight wars, biggest tax cuts ever. Right now we have more under construction with the factories, the car playing. You know, they're all moving back into the country.

They were stolen from us over a 40-year period. They're all coming back from Germany, from Canada, from Mexico. from the Japan. And then the interview concludes with a truly bizarre account, a truly bizarre statement about Bill Clinton. And we've seen the photos in the Epstein files. We've seen the innuendo. We've seen how cozy Donald Trump and Bill Clinton were earlier in their careers.

But now you would think that if Trump is trying to distance himself from the Epstein files, trying to back out of it. He wouldn't say something like this. I think I had the greatest first year that we've had. But you think they may come after you again? Well, they'll find something like I did an interview with you. And because I did the interview, let's impeach him or something. Anything out there that Americans are going to be surprised about that year? They shouldn't do it. They shouldn't do it.

And that's one of the things. I didn't do it for that reason. But it bothers me that somebody's going after Bill Clinton. See, I like Bill Clinton. I still like Bill Clinton. I still like though. What do you like about him? I liked, well, I liked his behavior toward me. I thought he got me. He understood me. I mean, this is not normal behavior.

Look, it is somebody who doesn't want to talk about his thousands, tens of thousands of mentions in the Epstein files. But this is a man who is just trying to confuse everyone. It's the word salad, the Donald Trump standard of. no substance. All right. Guys, man, time flies when you're having fun. I'm Josh filling in for David Packman. We've got plenty more to cover today.

And if that's not enough, you can catch me over at Ring of Fire Weekends on YouTube. It's the Ring of Fire on YouTube. And then you can find me on my newly launched Facebook and IG pages at the voice of the left. I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to have you drop a comment. Let me know what you think about me filling in for David. And we've got more content coming for you right here. A good hoodie matters more than people think, especially this time of year when you're reaching for the same layer every single day.

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code Pacman. Again, that's 20% off your first order at American dash giant.com. Use with code Pacman. The link is in the description. All right. Hang tight with me, guys. This is going to be data heavy. And I know I'm already cringing. This is coming from a right-wing source. But it's important because it ties directly with what the administration is claiming about their immigration policies. And to me, immigration is the biggest evidence that we see that this regime, the Trump regime, is not aligning their rhetoric with actual numbers. The actual numbers and what is happening with immigration, it doesn't.

live on the same planet that the Trump administration. So I want to walk through some of these numbers and what they actually say calmly, clearly, and carefully. And I want to use a source here that's going to make, I mean, it's going to make all of us uncomfortable. But it's especially going to make the people on the right uncomfortable because the numbers are coming from an unexpected source. It's a white paper put together by the right-leaning the libertarian Cato Institute. They're not exactly a socialist knitting circle here. And this week we saw, and this is part of a series that the Cato Institute has been doing over the last few weeks. The Cato Institute released a major white paper analyzing the fiscal effects of immigration on government budgets. And they went all the way back

from 1994 through 2023, 30 years. I mean, this is a really deep dive, a really deep dive into the economics of immigration in our country. It goes through multiple administrations, multiple economic cycles, booms, recessions, deportations, everything in between. And the conclusions directly contradict a large portion of what the people on the right are saying about immigration. So I want to start real quick, just to recap for those of you who don't know who Cato is and why this matters. Cato is a right-leaning libertarian conservative think tank. They are huge champions of free market economics.

They're skeptical of big government, of government spending. They don't like centralizing economic control. They're not at all progressive. And they are certainly not aligned with democratic messaging, anything on the left. They are not aligned with that. their interest here is economic efficiency through free markets, which means to me, if they're publishing this 30-year fiscal analysis saying immigration is not a budgetary disaster, which is how this comes to light, it deserves attention because this is someone from the other side contradicting the Trump administration. So let's talk about what these numbers and what they're saying. Let's start with the big numbers, right?

Between 94 and 2023, immigrants generated 24.2 trillion dollars in tax revenue. Compare that to the government spending on those same immigrants. The government spent $13.6 trillion. That means immigrants in this country just by being here and participating, in our economy produced a surplus of $10.6 trillion. So, I mean, that's a huge number. Now, let's keep digging into this because it gets more important as we go on, right? So this concept of this surplus, it means lower deficits, lower interest costs on government

debt. And Cato goes through. all of that. They go into the debt savings and you bring this total benefit, so not just the $10.5 billion. You're looking at the entire fiscal benefit, including the debt savings. It raises it to $14.5 trillion over those 30 years. That's half a trillion dollars a year. Over the last three decades. And look, it's important to note here too. This is a the best part to me. And this is like what you can take away and argue with all your right-wing friends on Facebook or wherever. The white paper doesn't just include immigrants that are here

documented immigrants. It includes the undocumented population as well. And the other surprising part is if you look through this, this wasn't just one year or a fluke or any weird spikes. Cato tracks the numbers year by year. Across the same period, across this 94 to 2023 period, again, immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in government spending and government benefits in every single year of their study. Not most years, not on average, every year. Kato even goes into what happens if we had the Stephen Miller dream. scenario where there are no immigrants. They modeled the counterfactual here.

They modeled what happens if immigration goes away, if it's dramatically reduced or eliminated. And the numbers are stark. Without immigration over the last 30 years, the U.S. government debt would exceed 200% of GDP, double the current level. And look, we know this. We know we're taking away workers. We know we're taking people away that are doing critical jobs in the United States. We're killing farms.

And we know that a smaller workforce means less tax revenue. And we know that undocumented immigrants, they're paying taxes and they're not getting benefits. And with all that lost tax revenue, you have higher per capita costs. and a greater reliance on the United States to take on more debt. So, yeah, Stephen Miller's dream would crush our U.S. economy. And there's another figure that I found surprising in this whole thing. Over their lifetimes, immigrants individually paid almost or approximately $130,000 more in taxes than the average U.S.-born resident,

$130,000 more in taxes than the average U.S. born resident. And that includes your federal, your state, your local, all taxes across everything. And it reflects this long-term participation that we've had of immigrants in our labor force. It goes through the consumption taxes, the payroll taxes, all of it. So yeah, we see the talking point. We see the right saying everything from houses to benefit. to entitlements, all of it, is that immigrants burden are governments. And they are, they're specifically saying, and immigrants aren't, but the right is saying

that the burden is specifically on your state and local government. So let's look a little bit more at those numbers, the state and local level. In that 30-year period, 94 to 2023, immigrants paid $9.6 trillion. in state and local taxes. And state and local spending was 4.7 trillion. Net surplus, 6.6 trillion over the whole thing, all numbers put together. So when people are arguing that immigrants are draining local budgets, the long-term accounting doesn't support that.

It doesn't support their claims. And we know that the right's going to run away from the data. They're going to run away from the numbers. and they're going to maybe say, hey, look, we're going to put these numbers if they come to light. They're going to put them in buckets. They're going to say, well, it's one thing, not the other. But again, Cato was detailed here, and I hate to give them their credit. But when we are talking about someone who should be on Donald Trump's side, directly contradicting his numbers, his talking points, I want to highlight that.

and the Cato Institute goes through all of the categories and the costs are real, right? Education, all of that. We're still seeing the immigrants paying more tax contributions than the costs over time. Now, I will show what the right is going to say that they are going to point to in this whole study. Cato highlights the mismatch between where taxes are collected,

and where the services are provided. I already said that a lot of these costs are occurring at the state and local level, while the biggest tax revenue is going to the federal government. That's a federalism issue. That's an issue between our federal government and our state governments. It's a budgeting issue. And so when you see the Trump administration hammering these blue states, he's not dealing with fact.

He's cutting spending for child care. He's cutting spending across the board, especially in blue states, claiming it's because of immigration. The fact is, immigrants are subsidizing non-immigrants. And again, I mentioned earlier that this white paper includes undocumented immigrants. And here is a statistic that is going to surprise people. Non-citizen immigrants, including the undocumented ones, accounted for approximately four. 44% of the total fiscal benefit in this study. That works out to about $6.3 trillion in surplus.

So non-citizens and undocumented immigrants gave this country $6.3 trillion of surplus over the last 30 years. That is directly contradicting what the Trump administration is out there saying and trying to sell us on why they're invading our cities and why they're snatching people off. the streets and why they're tearing families apart. They're saying it's because they are a drain on our economy and on our government budgets. They aren't. They aren't. You know, immigrants aren't using welfare more than anybody else. According to Cato's analysis, non-citizen immigrants consume about 53% less in welfare benefits than U.S.-born residents.

53% less. and that includes all the programs that the right wing are citing in their political arguments about public assistance. And it's because the lower participation here is driven by eligibility restrictions. They, you know, non-citizens, they don't have the same eligibility for benefits that citizens do. We see the employment patterns, the demographic differences. We see education. I talked about that a minute ago. It's usually the biggest cost associated with immigration.

Cato accounts for that. When all of this money is included, including education, immigrant households are still ahead of the curve. And it's just showing us this long-term benefit, the upfront costs followed by a long-term benefit. And in all of that, we are coming out ahead. And it's consistent with any of it. your basic human capital economics. Now, I want to point out that Cato didn't put this out because of altruism. They're not putting this out because suddenly they've shifted their ideals on how this

country works and how the economy works. They published it because immigration aligns with free market economics. We hear all the time that immigrants do the jobs that citizens don't want to do. and when you have a larger labor force, it supports growth. Higher productivity expands the tax base. And we hear Dr. Oz asking for more productivity, kids to start working a year earlier, seniors to work a year later. Well, here's your answer if you want more productivity. More workers reduce the costs of government services.

And when you restrict immigration, it constrains labor. It raises prices. Hey, there, right, right there is your inflation. And so when you start cutting out all the people who do the jobs, prices go up, and economic output is slowed. And if you compare this to the dominant political narrative on the right, the MAGA talking points, immigrants are, they're blamed for the budget deficits,

the strained public services, fiscal irresponsibility, fraud in daycares. But the numbers are real and the numbers show trillions of dollars in fiscal benefit. Lower long-term debt, higher tax revenues, reduced costs per capita, and that gap is glaring. But the right and reality, not meshing, it's not accidental. It tells us exactly what we already know here. It's just like anything else in Trump's policy. Trump's not a conservative.

The Cato Institute being a conservative organization, calling out Donald Trump is like the NRA, calling out Donald Trump for not being a Second Amendment guy. Trump isn't a conservative. His approach to immigration is not conservative. It's not grounded in free market economics. The tariffs, they restrict trade. And American taxpayers pay the tariffs. Mass deportations shrink our labor force. enforcement surges are increasing the government spending and again this DHS bill the funding bill is skyrocketing spending

and now you see investors there's uncertainty so investments are all over the place markets don't like chaos the economy doesn't like the Trump chaos so the data that Cato is presenting it makes it clear that immigration supports our economic stability They are a vital part of our economy. And if you wanted to point to one thing that has driven costs up in this economy and made our markets unstable and made jobs just disappear across the country, it is this immigration crackdown. And this Trump-style war on immigration is undermining our economy. And again, this study runs all the way up through 2023. So the recent immigration surges, all the stuff that Trump's blaming on Biden, the economic shocks, the COVID, all of that.

Even with all of that accounted for, immigration made the country more money than our country spent on immigrants. And so that makes it extremely difficult, extremely difficult for the administration to justify that immigration is, a cause for any of our problems. After 30 years of data, it's straightforward. Immigrants and immigration, they reduced deficit, they lowered the debt pressure, and they expanded the tax base, producing a surplus for our country. And again, conservative accounting assumptions, conservative-based Cato here. I think you guys should read all of this yourself.

It is absolutely stunning. And you guys all out there, you need to look at this. And again, this is a perfect talking point. When your angry uncle comes at you on Facebook or when you're at the dinner table, are you in politics? Show them the Cato study. So I'm going to cover this next story in our next block. But again, I'm Josh from Ring of Fire. You can catch us on YouTube, theringoffire.com.

I'm filling in for David. And if you like the job I'm doing, or if you hate me, go to my newly launched social media pages on Facebook, on Instagram, at the voice of the left. I'm Josh. We'll be right back with more content. When it was time for a new mattress, I didn't want to gamble on something generic. I had heard about Helix. I like that they customized the mattress based on how you sleep. I'm mostly a stomach sleeper.

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And it comes from a federal courtroom in Minnesota. And it is hilarious. I love this story. This week, a DOJ attorney named Julie Lee said something in open court that almost no government lawyer, any lawyer, anywhere, ever says. She looked at a federal judge and said, the system sucks, this job sucks. Absolutely unbelievable. So who is this Julie Lee? So she was a probationary attorney, career government lawyer, and she was temporarily assigned to help handle this massive.

surge of immigration cases. And when I say it's massive, I mean massive. We're talking 90 cases given to Julie Lee in just a few weeks. And that workload alone explains so much about how much and how often this administration is violating people's rights, especially in this immigration surge. This hearing, it wasn't, though, one of the routine hearings about any of these 90 years. plus cases. Judge Jerry Blackwell called this hearing for a very simple but important reason. We've seen it everywhere. The federal government is violating court orders. Orders to release people, orders to follow procedures, orders with deadlines and actual written orders. They are not following them. And so according to the transcript, the judge says

the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of individuals seen by this court have been found to be lawfully present as of now in the country. So it made the judge ask. The same question we're asking, why? Why?

DoJ? Why DHS? Are we having these issues where you're not complying with court orders? So, the Department of Justice sends a probationary attorney, Julie Lee, alone. No supervisors, no senior attorneys there just her, nobody with the authority to actually comply with these judge's

orders. And she had to explain the systemic failure of DHS and the DOJ. And look, when she was questioned, it was clear immediately she doesn't have the answers. Why? Because she's not getting answers from above her at all. And so finally, she just gives up. She stops trying to dress it up. She tells the judge, what do you want me to do? The system sucks, this job sucks. I'm trying with every breath I have to get you what you need. And then the most hilarious line of all. I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I could get a full 24 hours of sleep. A DOJ attorney asking a federal judge to throw her in jail because she's exhausted. By the way, she also told the judge that she's previously tried to resign from DHS.

But, quote, they couldn't find a replacement. So I gave them a specific time to get it done. If they don't, then by all means, I'm going to walk out. And I find these quotes so hilarious, but they're also so brutally honest. it's because she wasn't melting down because of a court deadline. She's melting down because the system is drowning her in this avalanche of cases, pushed by this aggressive enforcement, no legal infrastructure to support it. Again, more than 90 cases here.

And no answers coming from above. She was the sacrificial lamb. And of course, it's saying everything about how accountability is working with the Trump regime. There is none. They don't care about court orders. They just offer up some low-level overwhelmed attorney. And predictably, right after the hearing, Julie Lee was removed from the assignment. Why? Because she said the quiet part out loud. And it's just more of this administration violating the law absolutely brazenly. Just to catch you up again, I'm Josh. I'm filling in for David. He's off in Portugal. I think he's negotiating with those orcas that are

sinking all the sailboats. But you can catch me on Ring of Fire weekends. That's YouTube.com the Ring of Fire. Or you can check out any of my social media pages, Instagram, Facebook, they're newly created, at the voice of the left. But we've got a lot more content coming up, so stick with us. You know, I'll often talk to my friends about what do we really think is private on our computers and on our phones. And many people believe that their emails are genuinely private. And it turns out that a lot of the email services are looking at your emails and can look

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migrate your emails, migrate your contacts. You really can't go wrong. Try start mail for yourself completely free for seven days at startmail.com slash Pacman, which will also give you 50% off your first year. The link is in the description. So you've seen us cover the Trump NBC interview already. And one of the things from this Trump NBC interview that really matters, even though it was something that when I first heard it sounded very casual at the time, was Trump talking about Joe Rogan. And it really does matter more than it sounds like it should. I'm Josh covering for David Pacman right now. You can catch me on Ring of Fire Weekends, YouTube.com slash the Ring of Fire. And look, Trump doesn't name drop people unless they matter to him, unless there's something to gain from it or he can attack them. Joe Rogan mattered in 2024 because he functioned as a distribution channel into young men who don't watch cable news. They don't open up the paper if people even read the paper anymore.

They don't read opt-eds and they don't identify with politics daily. So this so-called manosphere and it was a group of comedians and it was led by Joe Rogan, it wasn't just a side show. It wasn't just comedians asking questions on a podcast. It was a pipeline. And this pipeline worked. It worked tremendously well for Donald Trump in 2024. Trump won the category of young men, men under 30 by double-digit margins.

So it was a real swing that happened. And certainly, Joe Rogan played a huge role in that. It helped decide races across the country because, the campaign through these Manosphere podcasters understood the dynamic, and they leaned into it, especially headed into November of 2024. So when we're hearing Trump talk about Joe Rogan now, it's not nostalgia or anything like that.

It's because Trump needs him again. And we've heard Joe Rogan lately. We've heard him criticize Donald Trump's policies on immigration. We've heard him criticize kind of the overhanded overreach and the fact that the economy is not improving under Donald Trump. So Joe Rogan has appeared recently to drop his endorsement of Trump. And we're seeing the same thing with polls. Polling over the last year shows that Trump's approval rating with the under 30, the 18 to 29 group with young men, it's dropping sharply. down 10 points or so from where it was around the election and where it was around the inauguration.

Only about one in four, one in four men are saying that Donald Trump is delivering for them. It's roughly a quarter. Roughly a quarter of the people that voted for Trump in 2024, these young men say they wouldn't do it again. And that erosion is super, super important because this was not a locked in group until this Trump campaign. And it was a collision of Charlie Kirk identifying with the issues that young men are facing. And Joe Rogan reaching out to them just asking questions. Rogan, we know this. He's not a policy communicator. He's a mood guy. When he starts questioning Trump or criticizing him, it signals a shift, a shift in mood, how people feel about what Donald Trump is doing.

And look, the audience, they don't follow party loyalty. They follow tone, authenticity. So when Joe Rogan's tone about Donald Trump changes, young men's behavior is changing. And that's going to bring me to a deeper dive into some data here. After 2024, Democrats identified that they lost with young men. So they launched and it got a lot, it got panned through the media. They brought up the Sam project, the Speaking with American Men project. It was like $20 million spent up front.

It sounded like this watered down consultant product versus going toward actual activism amongst young men. But this study, this group, Sam, has a persuasion goal. And we shouldn't hide that or deny it or walk away. from that. We do need to understand that it is a persuasion goal in the context of the data we're talking about. There was a huge sample in the last survey they did, 4,200 young people, 16 to 29, an oversample of more than 3,400 young men. And the data was weighted. They did all the scientific work to make sure that this data was correct. They ran focus groups. They were in virtually all the states, I think 40 of them,

recruiting people based on various experiences and political identities. They were everywhere. And what the data is showing, isn't that young men suddenly became conservative? Let's look at what this data actually shows. About 84%

of young men report carrying a lot of stress in their daily life. 77% feel like they're on their own without support. we see the same numbers saying that men are judged harshly for showing weakness it's that machismo that macho man feeling and they feel like they're being criticized for not having enough of it and here's important part 57% say they held back their opinions out of fear of social backlash and so young men felt left behind so that's where trump joe rogan charlie kirk they picked these men up these young men, they picked them up when they felt like no one identified with them at all. And then we talk about the economy because the economy is important. It's not improving.

And these young men identified the economy as a major, major issue for them. 38% saying that they're just getting by and not really saving any money. 31% report being homeless or near homeless at some point in the last five years. There's 28% of them have more than one job. And a majority of them say that rent, housing, affordability, day-to-day, thinking, all of this is not secure. And this is the environment that Trump walked into in 2024. And he didn't win them by persuading them on tax policy or tariffs. He validated their feelings and turned it into anger.

And he used that anger to promise disruption. disruption from a system that left them behind. And he framed himself as this person that was willing to break that system and unrigged the system against them. Of course, just like with everything, the Trump promises didn't help. Housing's not cheaper, rent's not cheaper, old-fashioned groceries are still expensive,

job security sucks, Trump didn't make their life any easier. And so these young men, they're seeing the outcomes not match the branding that they were promised. And this data is showing us that this economic instability and the fact that these men feel left behind are major factors in what they are going to do moving forward, 2026, 2028, whoever can reach out to them and have credible leadership and give them stability, economic breathing room. those are things that these young men are looking for and then there is

an element of foreign policy that lines up with all of this younger men especially gen z are completely opposed to war and you know Trump the peace president begging for the Nobel Peace Prize promised them no new wars no new wars

they grew up watching war after war debt instability trauma their friends coming back back from war absolutely devastated. So when Trump broke the promise of peace by going to Venezuela, threatening Greenland, threatening Iran, all of this matters to Generation Z. It adds to their anxiety. And we as Democrats need to capitalize on this.

Not by capitalizing or furthering the chaos. We need to stop treating young men as this moral problem. We need to stop treating them like they are this irresponsible class. They are people that we can reach. They're people that aren't rejecting our system of democracy. They just are responding to fear and instability. So what do we have to do? We have to talk about reality in plain language.

We have to reach out to them about wages, about housing supply. rent stabilization, jobs, cost of living. They don't need lectures about identity. They don't need lectures about girls in the different locker room. They don't need that. They need their lives to be more predictable. And then Democrats have to show up in the same media ecosystem, right? Long-form conversations, podcasts, non-traditional platforms, not scolding, not talking down to them, not pandering to them,

just direct engagement that actually respects the fact that this group of young men is intelligent and they have lived a problematic experience one thing after another. And then we need to come across as the competent party, the competent answer to all of this chaos. As the Democrats, we need to exhibit strength. all right we need to exhibit that we are going to be the stability going ahead where trump is chaotic and finally we just need to deliver something tangible just something and all these studies show that we're doing the right things right small wins we just have to win on housing debt training pipelines any of this and we will fulfill the promise that trump never could

All right, guys, again, Josh, I am filling in for David Packman here on the David Pacman show. I am from Ring of Fire Weekends. We will be back for our members with a bonus show. I'll be joined by Patrick, the ever-present producer for the David Packman Show.