MAGA Media Turns on Trump (feat. David Pakman)

It's called Control, by big-giving fall short.

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I feel like people didn't really think about whether they had ulterior motives for a very long time and just kind of like celebrated them. And then when you really dig into the details, kind of controlling a lot of things. Yeah, it's one of the reasons we have a progressive taxation system in the country

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That's "Control Why Big Giving Fall Short" out now. Welcome to Pot-Sive America. I'm Dan Fiverr. You're about to hear my conversation with progressive political commentator, David Pakman. Someone I've long wanted to have on the show. David's been covering the news and talking politics online,

long in the just about anyone. Hosing the self-titled David Pakman show since 2005 when it launches a radio program at a little station in Massachusetts. We hopped on Zoom to talk about the weakest latest news, the Iranian negotiations, and the White House's attempt to pivot back to the economy,

as well as the growing revolt against the president among the magma media. We'll get to that conversation in a moment.

“Before we do, if you want to support independent media,”

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Go to Crooked.com/ESWE Dan for 20% off your subscription. And I hope you'll consider heading over to Crooked.com/Friends. We come with a friend of the pod. We can get this episode "Add Free and Get Access to My Subscribers Show" Policoster. Now, here's my conversation with David Pakman.

David Pakman, welcome to PotTV America. Thank you. We wanted to have you on the pod for a long time. I'm very excited about this. I want to talk about the media ecosystem, how they are structured. Communicate your career and how you got to be one of the longest serving progressive political commentators,

which is very impressive. But because this is PotTV America, before we do that, let's get to some news. This morning, Friday, when we're recording this, the Iranians announced that the Strait of Hormuz was now open. That'll Trump very cheerfully truth about how this was a great deal.

The Strait was open. There would be a deal with in a couple of days. We were going to get all of the dust.

There are all the other reports that we're going to give the Iranians $20 billion for that dust.

But it seems like things were in a better place than they were a few days ago.

“What is your take on this? Do you think, uh, it's just a big win?”

Should that we just give down Trump the Nobel Prize? Now, what do you think? I say we wait a little on the Nobel Prize, maybe. But no, I mean, listen, the theme is like our sinister setting fires. And then declaring victory when they partially put the fires out after they've already done a bunch of damage. And I was going back and forth with some people on social media yesterday about how

can't I just say it's a great thing to open the Strait of Hormuz or Strait of Vermouth. I think, best not called it weird. Yes, just a weird thing. And of course, I wanted open. There's no reason to start pumping up the price of oil, which leads to more expensive gas for no benefit whatsoever for the average American who's just filling up their tank. Of course, that's good. But I think if we just talk about that,

we lose sight of the fact that this was optional to begin with, that even the objectives changed and didn't make sense. And it all really goes back to Trump getting out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018. And I played that clip for my audience this week of Trump doing this big announcement where it's all presented as if he's just so strong and powerful and smart saying we are getting out of this deal. That was really the moment that led to

90% of what's taken place. And I said at the time, I'm not an advocate of the Iranian regime. I oppose right wing theocracies. They regularly threaten the existence of other countries. And also, if I were them from like a basic game theory perspective, it makes sense to go back to an enriching uranium once Donald Trump says we're out if only to have leverage for future

negotiations. So great, it's open. I think that that's a great thing, but it never should have

Right. It's like, we're going to end up here. If like, this can go a couple of ways. This trade is going to be open for the length of the ceasefire. Maybe they're going to extend the ceasefire and maybe they'll get a deal. This optimistic that they're going to get a deal in the next three days seems a little skeptical to me. These are usually complicated negotiations. But if they're on a path towards a deal, maybe the straight will stay open, we will stop bombing. Importantly,

“there will be a ceasefire in Lebanon with this reel. That is all important and good.”

But Donald Trump's best case scenario is probably a slightly lesser version of the deal that he ripped up in 2018. So this was like, to what end was all of this to just end up right where we were before? I'm so glad you brought that up because I did a breakdown last week of what was in the original 2015 deal, which was a terrible deal according to Donald Trump. It didn't make sense. So bomb a shouldn't have signed it, et cetera. And the administration by their own admissions

were struggling to get even back to the full strength of that deal. And it's beyond parity, it would make sense to laugh if it weren't all so tragic and so serious. And at the end of this

rainbow, what we hopefully would have is something that resembles 80 or 90 percent of the original

Iran nuclear deal. And so this kind of goes back to something that's an important prism when analyzing anything Trump does, which is he wants to take Obama and Biden's names off of things. I mean, we think about replacing NAFTA with the USMCA. And there are some differences in there about the percentage of vehicles and parts that can be made in Canada, US and Mexico, but it's basically a recreation of NAFTA with a different name and slightly different parameters.

This is the exact same thing all over again. And the priority seems to be not really ballistic missiles or regime change or nuclear. It's a race things that Obama has done and put

Trump's name on them even if they're operationally basically the same thing. Even if a deal gets

done, there are some longer term consequences here because there really was like why the Iranian regime is quite radical and quite anti-American. There was a growing, there were whole generations of Iranians who were raised to not necessarily hate America. They were looking for a more modern version of their country. And we've now, you know, we blow up a girl's school, we've been bombing their country, we've found their country a couple times now. But like we've set back the

possibility that one day, this regime will leave. And the one that comes in will be a more friendly one that's more friendly to America. It is set the US back in that longer term effort once again to go right back to where we were in 2015. I think that's right. And that applies in a lot of areas. I mean, when we're in and then out of Paris climate or WHO or WTO or whatever, one aspect of it is, can we undo the practical changes that these decisions make. And so like in

this case, we got out of a deal. Now we've bombed, they're trying to recreate the deal. Cool. But there's the broader problem, which is the US as an increasingly not credible negotiating partner or signatory to deals of all kinds. And this is why I say that the effect of this, even if you undo 100% of it, which I don't think you can, but even if you could, what about when the next

“administration is here? But other countries remember that the United States has had these circumstances”

where you make a deal, you stick to it as far as anyone can tell. And then on the whims of a president, they say, hey, we're out. I think this hurts our negotiating position, even beyond Donald Trump. One thing I've heard from people over the last since Trump's been reelected from people abroad or people who work in foreign policy is our allies, you know, international organization on the road, we're willing to sort of accept the idea that Donald Trump's first election was this black

swan event that just happened. He didn't even get the plurality or majority of votes. Through all these crazy circumstances, it happened the US lost its mind for four years and then we were back to the sort of the core American values and approach to foreign policy that has existed through both parties since the end of World War II. But now that that's happened a second time and it's well of your period. No way, you know, Europe is thinking differently,

NATO is thinking differently like there's a real question whether you can rely on the United States

to actually be the partner it has always been because we're always four years away from, you know,

“someone like Donald Trump, I think is the issue. Well, even after President Biden won in 2020,”

we knew we weren't out of the woods because tens of millions of people had just voted for Donald Trump for a second time and then now we have tens of millions of people who actually voted for him

is like a critical reminder of the approach of this administration and why other countries are right

to be skeptical of Trump or the US's commitment to those institutions. Trump spent years saying on NATO, nobody else is paying enough, we might not come to their defense under article five, if they don't pay what Trump believes they need to pay. And then Trump says, hey, NATO, they need to come to our defense by which he meant we created a mess in the Strait of Hormuz. Now there's consequences, please come and help. Now, of course, article five doesn't cover

that scenario. Article five is about attacks on NATO allies, not problems you create in non-nado bodies of water that you then are desperate for help for, but on the one hand, Trump was saying, even our commitment to article five for other countries is a question mark. And then going, forget about article five, come help us in the Strait of Hormuz. That's crazy when you look at it from the point of view of our allies and that is an impact. And then, and when you consider that just

only a few months ago, Trump was threatening to invade a NATO ally in order to get Greenland, so which that also was not going to help things. Do you think, let's say this deal holds in by the time people hear this on Sunday, it may not have held, but just live in the hypothetical rest I can hear, which is, let's say, Strait remains open. Maybe we have a deal, maybe we are in definite negotiations with the Iranians to seek a deal, but price of oil starts to come down.

The, some of the economic impacts are to come down. Do you, do you think that what happened over the last few months with Iran is going to have a lasting political impact, or at least last long enough through November, or will it fade if we memory hold like so much else in Trump in the Trump era? Well, if you're asking as to the effect on the November elections,

yes, I never wondered if very well could dissipate. I mean, it's, it's a crazy thing to think of,

“but primarily, I think voters are going to be going off of their perception of how the economy is,”

probably in the four to six weeks before the November election. Now, this isn't, the Iran situation is interesting because it's both foreign policy, but it directly affects the day-to-day economy of people. Not to mention, there's this ability to compare and contrast, Donald Trump spent a campaign saying prices on everything will come down, and he's talking about the sort of stone that he'll be using on the columns at his ballroom that no one asked for. The foreign policy decisions,

which affect oil and gas and through transportation affect everything else that people are paying for. His actions right now are very much indifferent to the average effect on a family's economy, but it, it pains me to say it, there is this sort of relatively short memory on a lot of the stuff as far as voters are concerned, and so if gas prices do come back down by November, and inflation numbers improve a little bit, I think there's a good chance that if Trump

offers him here over the next four weeks, what we thought would be 40, 60 vote, swing in the house of representatives might be much smaller. Now, I still think Democrats take the house regardless, but it might be like a 15 seat swing or something like that, which would not be the overwhelming

“blue wave that is possible. Yeah, I think if gas prices are not at $4 a gallon,”

Trump will have avoided the worst case scenario for him and his party. I do think there is some lasting damage here from the war that will affect him in November. One, he has any chance that the economy was going to get significantly better than it was. Pre-war was ruined by the war. Inflation is back up. There is a long bottleneck on some of these prices. We're already going to suffer in food prices from the fertilizer costs, because he did this during planting season.

So farmers were already making choices. They were already paying more for fertilizer, and then making choices about how many acres to plant based on that. And so it's not going to be as good as it could have been if he hadn't gone to war, so that takes that off the table. And it's like, if we're being totally brass taxed out there,

since approval ratings only drop four points, basically, since the start of the war.

Now, there was between 38 and 42, probably matters a lot in some of these seats, but I do think that this is one of those high-profile things that affects people in two ways and how they think about Trump. One is the idea that he's out of control, and that's a problem for Republicans, because generally what people want is some balance in these elections that's sort of the thermostatic public opinion piece here. And the other thing is this is now the second

thing he has done that's like, he's like stood up, wave his arm around, jump just highs,

“you can say, "I'm going to raise your prices," and that hurts. Like, so I think the amount of”

the impact from this war depends a lot on the price of gas, if you're going to agree with that. But I think he has done damage to himself and made things harder for the Republicans. I think that's true. And I wouldn't understate the importance of those four points,

I don't know if it's 22 or 28 percent or I don't know exactly what it is, but it's the shoot people on Fifth Avenue and they don't care kind of crowd. So when you're at 42, losing four,

“I think it's actually quite significant to the end of the”

convincible electorate, if that makes sense. Yeah, that's right. I think I don't know what his floor is, but it's certainly below where we've now known it's below 42, and you just want him to be as low as possible, because also if he's mired in 38, it does just there's such a narrative of despair within the party that it has to affect turnout. Pots of America is brought to you by fast growing trees. Did you know fast growing trees is

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terms and conditions apply. Positive America is brought to you by common power. If you're listening to this podcast, you know the stakes of midterm elections. If you still need convincing, just scroll through this administration's latest blunders. I would just point you to any news article about the war neuron. Hmm, so good reason to worry about what these morons are up to. To save America and democracy. Common power needs your support. Common power is the organizing force for

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Uh, look, we don't tell you guys for the thousands time how important these midterm elections are. It will really matter if a lot of us get out there and knock on doors and talk to people and talk to our friends and talk to our neighbors and just make the case for why they have to vote, why we need to check on Donald Trump and why we need it right now. Support the organizing force volunteers fighting to shift the balance of power at common power dot org slash crooked. That's

common power dot org slash crooked. All right, let's pivot real quick here to the affordability toward the Trump it's been on. He was in Vegas on Thursday night to do a round table to tell his no tax on tips policy. This is the tax credit that they've pinned their hopes on to try to

salvage the midterm elections. Here's what Trump had to say to a group of Las Vegas workers. Let's

take a listen for the remainder of 20 26. You're going to see a big surge. The numbers are really tremendous and this is why I'm out here. If they were bad, I wouldn't be here today. I'd be sitting home watching television and I don't forget we're having some fake inflation because of the fuel, the energy prices. Earlier this week at the White House, I've met a wonderful woman named Sharon Simmons, a grandmother driving door dash to help support her husband's cancer trip and she's

“got serious cancer. She's going to be okay. I think Sharon delivered McDonald's through the”

overall office was a little bit of a, you know, I mean, to be honest, a little tacky. The ins of American small businesses, including restaurant, street laners, corner stores, what is a

corner store? I've never heard that term. I know what a corner store is, but I've never heard

it describe a corner store. Who the hell wrote that, please? What do you think? Is this a winning economic message? No, I mean, there's so, there's, this is so chock full of things to talk about. You know, I mean, I, to go back, there was this incredible moment with the door dash grandma. Yeah,

she goes, I don't really have an opinion on that. I'm just here for no tax on tip. So that was very interesting because it was someone telling the president, this culture war stuff, I'm worried

“about what's happening in my budget. That's what I care about. The most tragic part of all of it,”

though, is that there is no, there is no no tax on tips in the bill. What this is is a deduction and it requires five minutes of discussion, but this is something that it'll benefit the average tip worker at the most a couple hundred bucks a year, which I'm not dismissing is nothing, but when you're thinking about child tax credits of a couple thousand bucks and different, there's lots of other things that can be done for working class people. You get to deduct up to $25,000 in tips

from your federal income, the vast majority of tip workers are paying very little if any federal income tax. So there's actually not that much left to deduct. Same thing with no tax on, on social security, Trump raised the deduction a little bit for seniors, but these are not at all the policies that are being presented with these one-liners and people are doing their taxes now. We just pass the tax deadline of April 15th and seeing that their tax liability really hasn't changed

“actually that much because of these bills. Now will they remember that in November when they vote?”

I don't know, but it doesn't strike me as a winning message, at least the way that he's presenting it. Yeah, you hear the White House talk, or you hear the reports trash like they're like we need to get back on the economy and message you can back on the economy. Talk about the economy, that is the key. I'm sure the economy is better than talking about the ballroom or in better talking about the war, but Trump's a very bad economic messenger. That is something that has,

he is a good economic messenger when he's in charge in the economy is good and he is a good economic messenger when he's out of power in the economy is bad, but when he's in power in the economy is bad, he's terrible because he can't admit fault. He can't do the bill Clinton feel your pain thing. He can't say, you know, he just can't give the honest answer like I inherited a mess. We've made some progress. People are still hurting. We need to do more and here are the things we're

going to do. That's the message that works. It's the version of the message that Obama had to do

when in his first term after the 2008 financial crisis, but Trump cannot, he just cannot do it.

And he's got to call it fake inflation. He was interviewed by a bunch of reporters headed to the helicopter at the White House on the way to that event and they asked about high gas prices and he denied the gas prices were high and that attacked ABC News for saying the gas prices were high. He just can't do it. It's just not, he's just like what people want to hear, he can't say. And what he generally says is either sort of nonsense or it's the kind of thing that pokes people

“in the eye. Like in the gas prices question from yesterday, he brought up the stock market. Like I remember”

in sitting at Focus Groups in 2009, 2010, and you know, these are people swing voters, soft Obama voters, people hurting in that economy, as many people were, but if anyone brought up the fact that the stock market was up, they would flip the table over an anchor because of that to them signify that all these other people were getting rich or they were doing fine in the average person weren't. So like he, he is sort of a bad economic messenger and that's a gigantic

shift from his first term. Yeah, I mean, I don't think Trump realizes the degree to which stock

market holdings are highly, highly concentrated at the top. And a lot of people do have 401k's in retirement accounts that are tagged to the market, but in terms of holdings, it's a relatively small amount of money compared to the very wealthy. It's interesting to see that a message that they correctly, the Trump people correctly identified during the Biden presidency that simply repeating that everything's awesome doesn't convince people if they don't feel that it's awesome.

Now, I'm using the word feel because it may be pretty good by most economic metrics, but perception really is reality with the economy and how it feels when you're looking at how much money is left at the end of the month, what's what's coming in, what's going out and what are my expenses? The maga people stumbled upon the reality that you can't convince people the economy as good if they don't feel it and they're kind of doing the exact same thing now because they don't

seem to have any other ideas. Yeah, it's, it is doing exactly what Biden did, like it's tight, it's touting macro economic numbers to convince people that they're what they were seeing personally in their lives, their bank accounts does not matter or is not that important. You know,

it was like the Biden people are always citing the how low the unemployment rate which is great,

like that is better than a high unemployment rate, but it just isn't just this exchange effect of people are just paying so much more money for the things they need in their daily life, groceries, gas, housing, and people are getting hammered right now with utility bills, just absolutely hammered particularly in this past winter as like these cold spells all across United States, heating bills through the roof, and there's no actual attempt to try to solve

on politics, you either got to solve the problem, you got to get caught trying to solve the problem,

“and Trump's doing neither. It also sometimes is important to talk about what is being measured”

and the example I often give is, you know, if you put Bill Gates in a room with nine other people and you talk about the mean net worth of that room, you would go, this is the wealthiest group of people I've ever seen, but the mean would be the wrong metric in that scenario. You could have nine broke people and then Bill Gates and it averages out in that way to something that looks pretty good. We know that you can mess with all of these indicators and create a perception that is different.

I'll just give you one example that always comes back. When the unemployment rate was low,

under Democrats, including Barack Obama, the right was obsessed with talking about the labor participation rate, and they insisted that the labor participation rate is really low and therefore the economy is not actually good because too many people are out of the economy. Now, it was true that the labor participation rate had been declining, but it's been declining for a long time as the population ages and more people retire. You could spin that on its head and go,

hey, listen, the fact that people can afford to retire is good and that's going to lower the labor participation rate. The point I'm making is no matter what's going on with one metric, you can pull some other metric out and go, this is the one that really represents what's happening to the average person. And as we learned under Biden as we're seeing right now, those macro

indicators, as you said, don't really tell the story of what is happening in terms of the median

American. What did you make at the Dordash grandma of that? Was it a good press event, a good message? I can't go both ways on, I'm curious you'll take. On the net, I mean, I think on the one hand, I thought back to the Trump McDonald's thing. Yeah, saying that's the exact same. And so like,

“I think Trump does well when it's just pictures or video where you don't hear anyone talking, right?”

So when you saw Trump wearing the headset and the apron at McDonald's, it's like, okay, that imagery is actually kind of useful to Donald Trump, Trump opening the door to the Oval Office and greeting this grandmother and taking the bags of McDonald's. I think there is a significant part of the American population that sees that and goes, okay, that's an image I can identify with. But then the messaging around it, I think, was terrible and the event was pretty widely ridiculed.

It even got Trump to say when he talked about it on Thursday, that it was tacky. I think was the word that he used at the end of the day. So I don't think in the net, it was a beneficial event. Yeah, I had the exact same thought was every Democrat ridiculed the McDonald's event. And like, it seemed cheesy and what we did not calculate in a lot of the Democrats, I'm talking about it, didn't calculate in 2024, was that it's the kind of thing that goes viral

and it got so much attention and it got viral because people who love Trump were posting it, it got viral because people who wanted clicks were posting it and it got one viral because Democrats were making fun of it. But everyone saw it. And this was poorly executed. Like, I think Trump should not have taken a bunch of questions from the press and like he could have just, there was a way to do this probably close to right and it got a ton of attention.

Everyone was talking about it. Every, you know, everyone mentions that it was tax, no tax on tips was the reason for it. And so like to me, there was a little bit of a lesson

“of like we do have like for Democrats is sometimes you got it, like you have to lean into the things”

that are going to get attention and this did get attention. Trump did not execute it well because as you mentioned, he spoke and that has often been downside for him. But like it's easy to like completely like look at the sea of the cable coverage of it or even the Twitter coverage of it and say this was this was a total loss for him. And then if you go like with McDonald's thing, if you go on TikTok or Instagram, you see it's everywhere. Like one of the things you can do that can break

out of the bubble, the political media bubble and get to those people. And this at least had the potential to do it. Trump just kind of stepped on it. Yep, I think that that's right. But I think on balance, the maybe my feeling in two months will be different. But looking back at the McDonald's thing, it seems that that was pretty clearly a win for Trump. Yes, I agree. Where's this one is seeming at best like a wash? Yeah, I think it was a had the potential for a win that

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All right, I'm going to spend some time talking to you about what we're seeing inside the right-wing media ecosystem. Last week in an extended rant on true social, Trump called out Tucker Carlson, making Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones by name. He did that again here on Friday morning. He called on the opposite of Naga. Although those four of the only ones

criticizing Trump, there have been many more of been critical including some a bunch of really

“important Trump supporters in 2024. Let's take a listen. Here's a leader who's mocking the”

gods of his ancestors, mocking the god of gods, and insulting himself above them. Could this be the antichrist? Most people that voted for Trump or wanted Trump to be an office. One of the things that was attractive was this no no more wars. Sure, of course. And now we're in one of the craziest ones. What kind of delusional reality are we living in where he's parading around the grandma that's working DoorDash, so she can afford to pay her husband's cancer bills. And he's like,

say, we're not doing tape. One of the features of most of Trump's decade on the public stage here around the political stage has been essentially no criticism from his media allies at all. That has changed in less couple months here. It started with the obscene files. It's gone in overdrive because of the Iran war. How significant do you think this is? Does it really matter to voters? Could it change the political dynamics or is this just sort of like porn for Democrats? I think it

does matter, but maybe in a different sense than some might think. I don't think that the comments for example from Andrew Schultz and Rogan are going to turn Trump voters into mid-term democratic

“voters, right? Because I think that that's just a difficult uphill battle. And you have to remember”

that a lot of the people that were activated by the manosphere and by Trump himself were previous non-voters. They were, they got involved in politics because of Donald Trump and the manosphere movement around him. So it's not, oh, you know, I sometimes voted one way, sometimes the other. I went Trump. Now I don't like this. I'll go back to Democrats. I think a lot of these folks, if they're not liking what they're seeing, they're going to stay home. Now that still presents an opportunity.

I think for Democrats to do some damage in November, but that kind of remains to be seen. The part I find very interesting about a lot of these clips is that there's no accounting for the role that they played and getting Trump elected. And so there's been a lot of, one of these, I think it was, I don't know if it was Schultz or which one, but maybe even Rogan used the word betrayed when it came to the war stuff where he said he was going to be anti-war and then he

does this stuff. I've said to my audience, if you have interactions with people who fell for it and now they're reconsidering, let's welcome them back. Let's not make fun of them. This is not how you get people out of cults. You say it's great that you're thinking for yourself. It's great that you're rethinking previous mistakes you made. But I also want to mention this was predictable. And the way that we know it was predictable is that our entire ecosystem of podcast and shows

was predicting that exactly this would happen. So it wasn't this completely nobody could have

“seen it kind of thing. And so I think that the approach has to be awesome that Rogan and Schultz and”

whoever are kind of changing their tone right now. But they're not absolved of the fact that this was totally predictable and expected. And they pulled in arguably millions of people into the sort of Trump world, softer Trump supporters, maybe than the hardcore maga base.

there will be whoever is after Trump. And the same sort of mechanism is going to be at play again.

“So I think that it's going to have an effect in the tapping and effect. But I want to do everything”

I can to make sure that we say this was not an unpredictable out of nowhere thing. We were saying these guys were wrong all along and it turns out they were. Yeah. And I think Andrew Schultz has talked a little bit about where he aired in this process. But for the most part, everyone else is, you know, they are just on to the next one. There's a few things I find interesting about this. One is these folks, particularly the political

ones like Megan Kelly and Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, they are, I'm sure they are conservative and their political views. I don't doubt that. And I believe that they probably genuinely like

Trump at some point, even if they don't like him right now. But they're also people who are responsive

to an audience and what has really driven the growth in right wing media from 2016 until now has been just a simple fact that you either pro-Trump or you died, right? All the conservative entities that were not pro-Trump, but tried to remain conservative one away, right, weekly standard, et cetera. So you either had to become very pro-Trump or you had to become like a member of the resistance, right? You had to be an anti-Trump organization. And if these people were seeing

giant drops in the worship or subscribers or advertisers, whatever else, they would not, I suspect that you would hear a different tone. And you're not seeing that. So I do think that there is something that has changed in the economic incentive structure of right wing media, which I

think is problematic for Trump. Second thing here is, and it's worth separating the, like the

Megan Kelly's in Tucker Carlson's from the Joe Rogans and Andrew Schultz's or the Theo Vans or any

“of the other man is fear the nope boys, any of those other people, because I think the main audience”

of the people actually like tune in to Megan Kelly and Tucker Carlson are political people, right? It's like the version of the right wing version of people who watch our shows. And then the people who turn into these other things are apolitical people who became interested in politics, because the, the host content creator influencer put that they trusted, talked to them about politics, and kind of pushed them on this. And for Republicans losing the apolitical people does

hurt with turnout, like as you point out, like that it like, I don't, I do not think those people are coming out for congressional Democrats for the most part. And maybe the right Democratic presidential candidate can get them in 2028, but you know, I just don't, you don't see them just being like, you know, Joe Rogan told me to vote for Donald Trump. I voted for him. Donald Trump kind of screwed me over. Maybe Joe Rogan screwed me over to. And so now I'm going to vote for

Lauren Boberg or something. Yeah, or I'm going to vote for John Ossoff or Janet Mills or you know, pick your Democrat there like that seems unlikely to me, but a Trump voter who does not turn out is a might is a net loss of one for their Republicans. And so that is bad. And if they do not, if just standard typical midterm voters turn out in this election, that's very bad for Republicans, because we dominate that space now. Then the thing is also, I don't, increasingly

Trump doesn't really have that much to offer a lot of these people anymore when at one point he did because he can't run again. Okay, I guess these people, these people being the, the hosts, the content creators. Yes, yes, right, the Megan Kelly's and these sorts of folks where the incentive to stick with him for future goodies of whatever kind there might be rides on Air Force one or

“Trump rallies for the next campaign or whatever. I think he's just got a lot less appetizing”

things to offer a lot of these people at this point. And so they're making the calculus, their audience has increasingly disaffected. We see it in the approval ratings and they're kind of trying something different. You know, this, this whole thing has started a big sort of debate about what magazines and Trump's polster Jim McLaughlin talked to Politico on Friday and he said this, the base doesn't consider Tucker Carlson making Kelly or Candace Owens conservative anymore.

My guess is most of their clicks are from progressives. Now, I don't buy that, but what do you think? Well, no, I don't buy that either. Not, not at all. I don't, I don't buy that at all. I think that there's another aspect to this, which is, is Trump is a even conservative by any traditional, right? I mean, the discussion of what's conservative at this point. I don't think I don't think there's much conservatism left anywhere in that movement. But no, the idea that

that it's left winners that are watching this stuff as kind of rage bait or for entertainment, I don't think that that's the case at all. In fact, most of my audience even says, hey, a lot of this stuff isn't even really worth reacting to because these people are increasingly on the margins of what we consider to be kind of like the valid political discussion and we don't even care to hear from them that much. So I don't buy that. I think the interesting thing here,

so there is a question of who is actually conservative. And you're right by any definition,

big, we're the U.S. government is taking over companies, we are taking stake in companies,

not like not a breaking sort of money, especially the imagination. Then there's a question like what is maga, right? Is maga a actual ideology of that is, you know, and this sort of presumed this idea that prior to 2016, there was this group of Republicans or, you know, this large group in America who were anti-immigrant, nativeists, populists on economics, anti-system who were just waiting for someone to leave their movement in Trump showed up or

is maga just another word for Trump fan. And I think it's, I don't know whether it started as the law as the former, but it's definitely the latter now. Like yes, they are not, Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly are not maga because they're not pro-Trump, but that doesn't mean

“that they, like, I think that's an important distinction for people to understand. Like,”

especially when you look at the polling, because the thing you hear all the time is, yeah, all these maga clinical maga influencers are turned against Trump, but 92% of maga voters support the Iran War. What's like, no, 92% of Trump fans support Trump's war. No shit, right? Yeah, I think there's a few characteristics at this point to maga. I mean, one of it is, it relies on what I call faux populist rhetoric. You might just call it

populist rhetoric because it's not policy. It's rhetoric. But I call it faux populist rhetoric is number one. It is reactionary at its core. And it's quite authoritarian as well. So if you think about libertarian republicans like Rand Paul and authoritarian Republicans like Trump, they land in very different places on policies. So I think that when we actually look at policy within maga, it's extraordinarily authoritarian. It's authoritarian when it comes to its

regulation of businesses, when we don't like the decisions Twitter is making about what can be published, we say the government now tells Twitter that they have to publish certain things like

“during the pandemic, for example, or whatever the case may be. So I think that those are kind of the”

building, the most important building blocks right now. But it's an authoritarian movement far more

than republicanism was for really for the last 20, the 20 years prior to Trump. Yep. Let's widen the aperture here a bit because I want to talk a little bit about your career. You've been making political content longer than I have, longer than most people doing it online. You've been hosting your show in some capacity, which I originally started as a radio program, I believe, since at least 2005, talk a little bit about how you ended up in this space and how

the media ecosystem has changed in that time period. I really started just out of boredom, a community radio station when I was in college started up and at that point you just had to sign up and you got a show. It was like a very low barrier. It was easy to get a show. But very quickly, you know, I came up when podcasts were growing and then YouTube for news and politics content got going and so I got involved in that. The biggest difference now from when I started was

when I started the pie was getting bigger so fast that as there were new entrance creating content it had no importance whatsoever on your audience because the pie was growing so quickly as people transitioned from cable and broadcast radio to podcast and online video. That's changed now because a lot of that transition has slowed down. There's sort of like a

critical mass that was reached and then growth slows down. So a lot of the people who have

trans who did transition over to digital media have done so already and they're sort of like a

“smaller opportunity for the pie to grow and so many people are now doing this. So I think I benefited”

a lot from timing in the sense that I got in early enough to build an audience and I was recently talking to some Canadian journalists who were just getting going in this and and I said it would be very difficult to start right now because there are so many more people doing this than there were. I think that that's great in terms of democratization and also it does put a little bit more of the onus and responsibility on the audience when it comes to media literacy

and determining what exactly am I getting here is this trustworthy. Do I understand the difference between news and opinion, et cetera? But it's a very different feel now and then the other thing is it's starting to get very corporate even in the online independent media space for two reasons. One legacy and corporate media all have a presence in podcasts in YouTube. CNN has podcasts in CNN as a massive YouTube channel. So I think that's one difference and then the other is private equity

and investment firms are getting involved in a lot of of what was previously completely independent media. So all of that is really changing the feel of the space. Do you think that's the do you think it is a negative that it's feeling is becoming more corporate? I think that there

it kind of flattens things. So a lot of stuff starts looking kind of the same and I in on my show

this week I talked about how some non-political YouTube channels have been sort of bought up by private equity and that hasn't necessarily been disclosed by the creators and so a lot of the same changes start being instituted across channels and so things kind of start to look more similar.

“I don't think that that's good because I think part of what makes the space interesting is that”

everybody has their own presentation style. The studios look different. The approach looks different. Losing that I think is bad. I do think that there is this reality that the right in the independent space has been so well funded for years that they've grown to dominate some aspects of it and that money was much later coming into the left and so I don't want to unilaterally disarm either and so I recognize that sometimes you do have to fight fire with fire

and some of that money coming in maybe necessary from a political perspective to fight the right.

There is finally money coming in to progressive content creators that has been many many many

years after it's been coming into the right and still at a much much lower volume. I've spent honestly much of the last 10 years going to meetings with donors who try to convince them that to take some of that money they were spending on TV ads that were largely being shown to people over the age of 65 and put it into any form of content creation that could be influencers, independent media, podcasts, etc. But it's still even after all of that you know really took

after the 2024 election for there to be like a real release a little bit in the run up to 24 and then after that more interested in it. What do you think that hesitancy has been among the Democratic Party establishment the funding base to actually get behind independent journalism

“or aggressive content creation? I think that the donors on the left have been very attached”

to institutions as a concept and so when you go to them and you go hey forget about a big institution here's the 10 biggest progressive shows they don't have anything to do with each other but together here's the audience they command. What about dumping in a bunch of ad money for example which the right does where they go hey listen we're not involved in your production we're just going to do ad spend so we're going to put your content in front of people on Facebook

and on YouTube we're just going to dump money in that way you could do that on the left and you could say hey I don't have to create any content here the 10 the 15 the 20 biggest shows they're proven already they have an audience let's just leverage that with ad dollars for example it's and I've pitched that to some people and they don't really seem to get it they're just they still think that doing the four minute hit on on cable news is better for an elected

official than long-form conversations and all of this stuff is changing so I may be more critical

“than where we are right now in 2026 but I think it's just like there's this difference to the big”

conglomerate yeah there's I my experience has been a couple things similar one the first problem is most of the people who are writing these checks don't consume YouTube TikTok it's just it's like it is a foreign world to them they do not understand it so you're asking them to give money to something they don't know what is they what they do know is television ads and they've been writing checks for television ads for however long they've had money and they see those television

ads because they watch 60 minutes or the football game or whatever else they see them and some will email them the link to the ad that they essentially paid for and then the second problem is and this is this really started in my era in the Obama era that we be as a party we became incredibly data driven which is good I'm not against that but we really decided we could figure out the exact ROI on every dollar spent and so it's like if you were running

a television ad you can at least say it's this many ratings points it's going to this is what the audience is this is how many people were going to your dollars are going to reach it is just a lot let like these are not to the extent you have metrics if you were investing in like the your add idea it's except you have metrics are not metrics that are particularly familiar to the people are paying for television ads and then if you're just saying invest in content creators themselves right

let's give some of them a stipend let's you know let's you know have some sort of funding that helps people get started or let's them level up like that it there is no it's that's a venture bet it's not a specific it's not a stock you know you're not buying an equity right so people have talked to really struggle with that because they became used this idea that there's this very specific formula that your dollar is going to reach this many voters we need this many voters

and with in a way in which without these the certainty of impact that they've had before because you're not exactly investing and this is like as the third reason is tied to it is short-termism every democratic unit wants to win the next election how and I understand that every one of them has been existential for a long time now so it's like we absolutely have to win the house how do we win the house let's how do we might not have to win the house when we're

saying is we have to build something that is going to sustain a progressive pro-democracy movement

for for the future for 26 for 28 for 30 for 32 and that we just have always been like we don't

have the version or haven't had the version of the cook brothers they were investing for the long term

“for decades you know I think that that long term thinking is what's missing and I've had a”

couple conversations with people who they weren't really looking to invest in anything in particular but they were trying to understand the space a little more which I appreciate and I said here's they said how would I know whether my dollars are working and how quickly and I said here's the way you kind of have to think about it imagine that what you identify the 20 largest progressive shows and we figure out hey cumulatively this is a billion and a half views per month and a hundred

million subscribers I'm just making up numbers it's probably would be like 30 million subscribers

and 1.5 billion views a month imagine if over the next two years by investing in the ad programs

using ad spend to boost these shows that triples to four and a half billion views a month and 90 million subscribers as candidates come forward in future elections as there are movements to support whether it's prop 50 or whatever isn't it mathematically obvious that three-exing the audience and viewership of these largest 20 shows is going to create a much more powerful apparatus and they kind of get that and I tell them you won't know how much of it is because of your money you will not that's

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code crooked for 20% off your first purchase that the BOMBAS.com/curricid code crooked at checkout you've learned over the course of your career here you've learned a lot about the environment you've written a book about it you've written a second book about it that's coming out this fall about the power of algorithm you talk a little bit about what you're about your book and and what it's about so the concept is pay attention which of course has a double

meaning we're paying attention to stuff we're also paying for attention and it's really it's not political in the partisan sense like my first book was and it's really just to look at how these platforms developed and how they actually do come from earlier forms of of media even though it might not be completely obvious how that is how algorithms today are dictating how people can exist in the same country but have completely different beliefs about not what should be but

but even what is and what is taking place right now AI is a part of it and how that's going to affect the space that we occupy probably significantly and it already is in fact in some ways and probably will even more with some ideas of of how to have a more balanced and healthy approach especially to news consumption but to media consumption of of all kinds and I've learned a

is on these digital platforms has to make decisions at some point about kids being on these platforms which is not a decision I have to make right now it's probably I don't know seven eight

“years away or something like that I think we really have to understand how we got to where we are”

and why I see certain things when I look at Facebook or TikTok and you might see something different and the effect that this has socioculturally and on the the economy so it's it's a kind of broad in that sense but it specifically focused on digital platforms and why they look the way they look

today your book is not political but the most powerful players in American politics and world politics

right now are the algorithms themselves yes right they are determined they've placed such a gigantic role in polarization news consumption what breaks through and like it is this may not be a part of your book but it is just worth noting that the most the algorithms that matter most are all owned by or most of them all but one of them are owned by pro Trump billionaires right Mark Zuckerberg and Meda Control Instagram Facebook WhatsApp and then you have Elon Musk control

in Twitter you know we now have a pro Trump billionaire chart of TikTok US like how like what level of concern does that give you beyond just the dangers of these algorithms to begin with it's

it's a huge level of concern but one of the things I do talk about in the book is that it might

seem as though the causality goes one way which is hey pro Trump billionaires control the algorithms therefore the algorithms promote a lot of this right wing stuff I actually think it's the the opposite way which is that the rights sort of argumentation is built for what performs best in these algorithms in the sense of divisive content performs better simple ideas with a clear scapegoat or someone to blame perform better you can go through this list of five or six things and you kind of realize

you don't have to build it in a way that it helps the right it there's something more structural in there and George Lakeoff has written a lot about this when it comes to political messaging you know you think about the concept of tax relief it's my money it's better and it's relieving when I get to keep it and on the left we're not the opposite of that we're not going around saying the higher the tax the better let's rate we're kind of saying hey we're in a society if we want to

have certain public services we need to set a tax level that's like a structural thing which social

“media explodes and then that's how you get the disinformation that's really simple with a clear scapegoat”

you know they're eating the cats and the dogs and all of this stuff it's built for these digital platforms and so I don't deny that the pro trump biases of the people in charge matter and are important but I actually think it's slightly less important than it might seem because there's such an algorithmic bias to the sort of stuff that the right is putting out that's an important point because the Facebook algorithm became a vehicle for right wing content when Mark Zuckerberg was still

a Barack Obama supporter right it like it it's that Steve Bannon Tucker Carlson the folks at Bright Barton daily call are sort of figured out early on how to hack the algorithm like water the things that worked and I remember sitting in the White House in 2014 when this was real when really Facebook really sort of blew up both as a as a major source of news for people it's the news feed became a certain way and as right wing messaging really sort of surfaced a lot

“and I remember sitting in focus groups after to remember the IRS scandal when there was these”

it would turn out to be a bunch of bullshit but that all the that there was accusation that a bunch of the Obama had some of gotten a bunch of people in a Cincinnati IRS office to scrutinize the party groups and I thought it was one of those when it blew up in Washington and I intercept White Blue up it's like the IRS involved in politics that has echoes of watergate it's going to get

attention but prior to that we would always in the White House have these situation where it's like

there be this big thing that like Dominique Politico and CNN then we would do focus groups and people in the rather country would have no idea what we were talking about right just not a clue we did focus groups on the IRS thing and everyone knew and then we did then there was like a VA scandal which is kind of the doesn't really blow up in the same way we did focus groups again everyone knew and every time they were sort of reading back reading they were framing it to us in

right-wing terms and when the moderator asks people why like how were they got this information the answer was Facebook and it's like the and they had sort of in the right it sort of figured out how to like you know it was like that those bright burnt headlines that were just like so offensive that they would generate so much outrage which would generate so many comments which would generate so much

almost shocking how fast they got good at it considering how bad they were at the internet in 2008

2012 is it you're do you think Democrats are you know we have a more complicated message we have

“a more a bigger tent things are I think harder for us in some ways but where I was saying”

not maximizing our opportunities here why do you think Democrats struggle with the sort of messaging that would do better on the platforms I mean I think I think part of it is just the messages are inherently a little more complicated and I say that without even a value judgment like they could be more complicated and better or not I happen to think most of them are better but that doesn't necessarily have to have to be the case I think that being late to the game to some degree and skepticism about

some of us as creators and being slower to adopt that and and being more risk-averse as well I mean

not none of these are new sort of insights but if you put them all together it has really slow

Democrats down quite a bit I mean only only after Kamala Harris lost the 2020 for election in December the Biden White House said let's have a bunch of creators here to kind of talk to us about how to work with them and this sort of thing and then the other thing is I can't speak to whether this

“is unique on the left because I'm not in touch with the staffers of any Republicans but one thing”

that does happen often is the communication I have with staffers from Democratic elected officials sometimes is really weird in the sense that it completely seems to miss kind of like what I do like I will get text messages from staffers that go hey our principle whoever it is just put out this letter about what should happen and you if you want a signal boost it and it's like no one in my audience cares about that that would immediately raise red flags of wise David reposting

press releases from elected official and so there's sort of like and we don't exactly totally know how to work with you yet doesn't apply to everybody but but that's something that happens a shockingly high amount of time in 2025 I went and I spoke at the request of the house I went and spoke to the house caucus about sort of the new median environment podcasting and how to think about content creators as part of your messaging I did the same thing for the Senate

you know when it's like it's sort of as you would expect and this is a broad generalization but the younger members get it more than the older members do and younger is doesn't necessarily it sometimes that mutation that just means how long you've been in the house right I got

always sort of argue that politicians like understand the median environment freezes and amber the moment

they get elected to office right which is like that that's the last thing they ever knew was what that what they how they consumed the media as a normal human and then that's it you know they're except like Bernie Sanders's team piece not the youngest is very good at this stuff like there are exceptions to it the staffers you know it's like I was I met with the staffers with a group of staffers and what was interesting was a lot of them get it like they you know there there are 20s

early 30s they consume media the way you when I consume media they like they listen to you those in the pot say America they do a lot they look superior to a lot of sub stacks but it's is very hard for them to to convince their bosses who all still live in the old media world both

“the members of congress or the chiefs of staff in some case typically in the Senate that's why”

these things matter and so they're just they're being told to bring an old world idea to a new media world we also as a party became obsessed with signal boosting at some point like around 2012 where it's like hey retweet this thing i'm going to send you and let's drive engagement to it and that was before their wire i mean you were doing it but there weren't as many content creators who were actually media figures who you could go on their show or have a conversation

with or work it into the coverage that you would sort of treat as um as a media as a part member of the media not a fellow democrat with a large twitter following you know and i think that that is they have struggled to adjust from that like the term signal boost drives me insane yeah yeah the other one that i don't like is hey i wanted to send you a couple of flags and i'm like don't send me any flags i don't think that's right now just let me know if you know your your boss wants

to do an interview and then we can actually have a conversation but to your point there are increasingly more and more i find it to be especially governors whose teams do really get it and our understanding that kind of like long form don't overmanage certainly don't say only talk about these three things just like if you can trust the principal let them do their thing and it's going to be far more authentic and and when you think about that it reminds me of when trump sat down with the milk boys

i mean he told a hundred and fifty lies during that thing but it didn't matter because you got the sense that he was kind of hanging out giving his genuine authentic opinion about things which is a deplorable opinion in so many different ways but the feel of it is something voters just

or their staff is like fine is like you have the goal when you go on a show up is not to just say

the words your polisher told you to say you have seven minutes you better no matter what happens

“you have to get all your message out in that seven minutes okay with the good you do the only”

answer the question deliver your answer and it's like that's not how the world works anymore for a couple reasons one people are very skeptical politicians so if you sound like a politician you're fucked it's over so if you're doing talking points you've lost i don't care if you're doing on CNN you're on your show you don't our show anywhere else you sound like a politician you've lost everyone the second thing is that you because people hate politicians and they're very skeptical

of them like you're starting a deficit so you have to convince them you're human so like what is the thing you authentically care about that's not politics right like what you know and like find you find a way to talk about that somewhere right that could be sports like you're Josh Shapiro's

always talking about philly sports he cares a lot about philly sports you hear jabby pritzker

cares he is a star wars nerd and he will talk about star wars till the you don't have the chaos come home and he didn't review where he came up on the america with love it and they talked about uh star their favorite star wars care he's ever they rank the star wars movies like that but like you just seem like a normal human and people are just like afraid to do that because and

“you can only do that in a long-form conversation that's right and the other thing which i think”

you you're sort of alluding to which is the talking points can't fill along to a long-form conversation so you all of a sudden have a 53 minute hole to fill yeah and you got to you got to talk you got to talk about thanks are there are politics other democrats out there who you think are doing it right who understand this media environment and are sort of communicating the right way and we'll stipulate a of c and zoron right away but are there others yeah i think i there's no there's no

one person that does it all perfectly but it in the last year definitely i mean i think Gavin News some's team definitely seems to understand how to use a lot of these platforms i think jabby pritzker is pretty good i was with them a few weeks ago in in chicago and did an interview with him and he was pretty free wheeling and was up for talking about whatever and his team seemed to understand who everybody was and i think that that that was a great thing not in more of an interview format

but adam shift is pretty good at putting out reaction videos to things that are happening in the senate and sort of like explaining how these relate to what people are experiencing and they get a huge amount of traffic so i think i think that that's uh that's strong i think west more has been quite good uh and his team seems to understand you there's really a lot that are getting better and better at it quarry bookers team also is pretty on the ball in terms of being proactive but

not in a way where they're asking you to cover press releases they're actually giving you hey he's

doing this thing here's what's interesting about it we would love for you to talk about it or whatever

kind of thing um so i think there's a growing list of of people who get it if you were giving it like we're gonna have summer between 12 and 200 democrats running for president in 2028 um if you had a chance to sit down with them and give them some advice about how to be a more effective more authentic communicator and that presidential election what would you tell them the primary thing would be get your staff out of the way you you've got to make sure that you are not trying to have

an authentic conversation with two weeks of forced an authentic communication between producers and staff in between because that that just really kills things i mean i think that that obviously know what you stand for understand what is important to you know who you're talking to all of

“those things are important but i think the most important thing is um don't don't allow staff to get”

in the way of what can be really good conversations David Pacman i think we'll leave it there thank you so much for spending the time with us today i hope to talk to you again soon my pleasure that's our show for today thank you to David Pacman for joining the show love it Tommy and John we back in your feet on Tuesday bye everyone if you want to listen to positive america ad free and get access to exclusive podcast go to

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