Is Trump's $1776 a bonus or a bribe?
The David Pakman Show
David Pakman
4.6 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2025
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
-- On the Show
-- Donald Trump promotes $1,776 cash payments to service members while escalating explicit oil-driven rhetoric about Venezuela, raising concerns that patriotic rewards are being used to soften troops ahead of potential military action
-- Donald Trump signs an executive order reclassifying cannabis to Schedule III, formally acknowledging medical use while stopping far short of federal legalization or criminal justice reform
-- Reporting reveals Susie Wiles pushed Donald Trump into a nationally televised address meant to deflect from her Vanity Fair fallout, resulting in a rambling speech that damages both Trump and his administration
-- Donald Trump appears disengaged and authoritarian as he dismisses congressional oversight and avoids accountability
-- Fox News anchor John Roberts publicly dismantles Howard Lutnick's mathematically impossible defense of Donald Trump's exaggerated pricing claims
-- Cardiologist Jonathan Reiner warns that Donald Trump's frantic speech cadence raises serious medical and leadership concerns for a sitting commander in chief
-- Trump administration officials delay credit for economic outcomes by pushing promised gains into 2026 while deflecting questions about present-day performance
-- The Friday Feedback segment
-- On the Bonus Show: The Epstein files were supposed to be released today, the Brown University shooting suspect was found dead, MAGA infighting spills into the Turning Point USA conference, and much more…
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(17:20) Susie Wiles media damage
(22:06) Trump rejects oversight
(28:19) Fox News math takedown
(34:16) Trump speech raises health concerns
(42:05) Economic gains pushed to 2026
(49:12) Friday Feedback
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Today, the presidency is somehow getting even darker, but also dumber at the same time. |
| 0:06.3 | We are going to start with Donald Trump's $1,776 cash payout to troops. |
| 0:12.7 | It's wrapped in patriotism and grievance and costume playing like the founding fathers, |
| 0:20.3 | but Trump is meanwhile ramping up this oil driven |
| 0:23.3 | war talk about Venezuela. |
| 0:25.9 | And there is a reason that people are getting a little nervous about the timing. |
| 0:30.3 | Then Trump actually does something on cannabis. |
| 0:33.2 | It's not legalization and it's not really reform. |
| 0:36.3 | But it is a move that Republicans swore would never |
| 0:38.9 | happen and now it blows a hole straight into their own talking points. |
| 0:43.4 | And then we also have Susie Wiles, the current chief of staff, starting to push Trump into |
| 0:51.8 | sabotage as it was her idea for Trump's deranged Wednesday night's speech this week. |
| 0:58.1 | We will also hear from a doctor about the medical state of play and then a Fox News host |
| 1:05.3 | of all people calls out Howard Lutnik for this ridiculous math of reducing the price of something 600%. |
| 1:14.5 | We'll also have your emails and comments and so much more. |
| 1:19.1 | What a day. |
| 1:24.1 | There's a term used in the military that a lot of civilians never hear, and it is called |
| 1:32.7 | surf and turf. |
| 1:33.7 | Now, it sometimes is about dinner. |
| 1:36.3 | Surf and turf, of course, the combination of steak and shrimp or steak and lobster, for example. |
| 1:42.9 | And sometimes surf and turf does refer to dinner in the |
| 1:47.2 | military. But there's another way in which the phrase surf and turf is used. And it is when |
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