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The David Pakman Show

Americans are leaving and credibility has collapsed

26 Feb 2026

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

0.031 - 5.399 David Pakman

Speaker 1 for the first time since the Great Depression, the United States is seeing net negative migration.

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Chapter 2: Why are Americans relocating abroad in record numbers?

5.479 - 25.009 David Pakman

This means more Americans leaving than moving in. I'm going to explain why this should be called the Donald Dash, where people are relocating and really what it says about confidence in the future of the United States. We'll also look at testimony from Casey Means, the nominee to be surgeon general,

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24.989 - 46.478 David Pakman

which did not go particularly well, dodging questions about conflict of interest, refusing to clearly endorse the measles vaccine and even offering some mystical answers. We will also look at new polling that a majority of Americans believe Donald Trump has become more erratic with age and that his brain is not functioning particularly well.

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46.959 - 54.473 David Pakman

And we will also look at Republicans reducing Epstein questions to Democrats are perverts.

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Chapter 3: What happened during Casey Means' confirmation hearing?

54.493 - 103.011 David Pakman

That's my summary or analysis. And what happened to J.D. Vance when he was confronted on Fox News of all places? All of that and more today. The David Pakman Show David Pakman dot com. The Trump administration is saying that falling immigration and rising deportations are a victory. In other words, when presented with the state of the Trump administration goes, well, of course, that's great.

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103.392 - 118.938 David Pakman

We're deporting a lot of people and we're limiting immigration. But the problem is, if you look beneath the hood a little bit. The number of Americans that are choosing to just leave the country, not for immigration related reasons, is going sky high.

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119.438 - 142.226 David Pakman

Now, one of the problems is we don't have perfect exit data because the United States stopped comprehensively tracking citizens who leave a while ago. But if you look at foreign residency permits, passport applications, home purchases, university enrollments, citizenship renunciations, they all point in the same direction. I was just in Portugal.

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142.847 - 169.317 David Pakman

Portugal's American population is up more than 500 percent since the pandemic. Ireland and Germany are seeing record inflows of Americans. Applications for British and Irish citizenship are at historic highs and requests to renounce American citizenship jumped sharply in 2024 in advance of the swearing in of Donald Trump. And they are again accelerating.

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Chapter 4: What does polling say about Trump's mental fitness?

169.357 - 192.139 David Pakman

Now, you know, it's this isn't really theoretical for me in a lot of ways. First of all, I was just in Portugal, met a ton of Americans who relocated there. These are not tourists. These are not we're trying it out for six months. These are families with kids, in many cases, mid-career professionals, retirees, people who sold their homes in the US and permanently have moved to Portugal.

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192.119 - 197.445 David Pakman

And when I would ask them why, there were only a few answers and they were very clear.

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Chapter 5: How does Glenn Grothman respond to Epstein-related scrutiny?

197.485 - 220.472 David Pakman

They were things like, I don't like wondering whether there's people in the grocery store who might pull out a gun or at the movies who might pull out a gun like they just don't really have guns around. They don't worry about their kids having to do active shooter drills. They don't worry about school shootings. They don't worry that a medical emergency is going to bankrupt them.

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220.452 - 230.985 David Pakman

They have predictable health care costs. Insurance is affordable. It's just lower stress. Now, more than 100000 American students are enrolled abroad.

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Chapter 6: What political shifts are occurring in Texas?

231.252 - 250.746 David Pakman

international students coming to the US are declining. And there's a Gallup poll that found one in five Americans would permanently leave the country if they could. And if they could is a big part of it. During the 2008 recession, for those thinking, well, it's merely economic, it was one in 10. So that is double that rate.

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Chapter 7: How does JD Vance deflect unfavorable polling results?

250.726 - 273.789 David Pakman

Now, I think this could reasonably be called the Donald Dash. Trump's second term has expanded deportations. They've cracked down on universities. There's a crackdown on free speech. There's an increasingly volatile political climate, deportation rates, you know, all this different stuff. And that is a factor in people choosing to live. Now, there's also systemic issues.

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Chapter 8: What controversies surround the halt of Medicaid funding in Minnesota?

274.29 - 293.708 David Pakman

Housing costs are a systemic issue in the United States. Health care expenses are bigger than Trump. Child care costs, student debt, burnout. All of this stuff is bigger than Trump. So I don't think it would be accurate to pretend that this is only because of Donald Trump. But historically, when people lose faith in leadership or stability, they leave. Americans left during the Great Depression.

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294.39 - 317.617 David Pakman

Citizens fled Nazi Germany, Castro's Cuba, Chavez's Venezuela, Russia after Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The US is not usually one of those places that we think of people leaving and fleeing. But emigration is happening. It's sending a signal. And it means that there are a lot of people in the United States who believe that their prospects are better elsewhere.

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318.178 - 337.504 David Pakman

And that is really an indictment of what is happening in this country. Now, I think it's also important to briefly sort of address the group of people like Elon Musk and others who are really worried about people not having enough babies. They're obsessed with we've got to get the birth rate up and we need more. We need people having three, four or five, six kids.

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338.726 - 355.945 David Pakman

Economics are often their primary concern. They believe we need to be growing in terms of population in order to grow economically. And that's sort of a controversial assertion. You know, it didn't China came to a different conclusion, but that's during their one child policy. But that's a different story.

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355.925 - 378.861 David Pakman

If you believe, as many of these magas do, that growth, economic growth depends on population growth and talent retention. When you start seeing working age professionals and families leave, you would say, wait, we're losing tax revenue. We're losing entrepreneurship. We're losing innovation. We're losing future births as well, because the people that leave will have kids other places, not here.

378.841 - 401.854 David Pakman

So the people like Elon Musk and RFK, you know, they're warning about declining birth rates. If Americans are relocating abroad, that compounds the demographic challenge. And you can't just sound the alarm about fertility and ignore the fact that people are leaving and you're not letting enough people in. And that shrinks the working age population. It puts pressure on Social Security.

401.894 - 424.407 David Pakman

It puts pressure on Medicare, puts pressure on GDP growth. If these magas were serious, they would realize we need way more immigration to the United States. Legal, certainly. But by some population experts estimates, we need to triple the number of legal immigrants coming into the United States just to account for the declining birth rate. But the big topic here

424.673 - 448.833 David Pakman

The Donald Dash people saying, I don't want to live in the United States under Donald Trump. And so quite simply, I am going to leave. Now, many of you have written to me and and you've said, David, are you thinking of going somewhere now? There is sort of like a where could I go kind of thing. certainly I could go back to my birth country of Argentina at any time.

449.494 - 476.415 David Pakman

Economic stability is not exactly a dream there. There's always the possibility of starting the citizenship process in Israel, but that's not appealing to me. There is a path to citizenship for Argentinians in Spain. That's another sort of possibility. But I'm not seriously considering it, although I would understand especially why people in red states would be thinking about it.

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