What did we learn from Donald Trump’s “Joe Rogan Experience”? Nothing good

“What is happening with the whales? I’ve read about this.”

Over the years, Joe Rogan has welcomed an array of accredited scientists and nature conservationists to “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Ten days before he subjected the planet to three hours of Donald Trump’s logorrheic free associations, he gave wildlife biologist Diane K. Boyd almost the exact same amount of time, almost to the minute, to talk about what she’s learned over four decades of studying wolves.

One wagers that if Boyd didn’t have a knowledgeable answer to why dead whales were washing ashore in New Jersey at a much higher rate than in past years, she’d say so and refer Rogan to a marine biologist or published findings.

But Trump has an answer. It’s windmills. “Well, they say that the wind drives them crazy. You know, it’s a vibration because you have those, you know, those things are 50-story buildings, some of them.”

“Right. And they’re super sensitive to vibrations and sounds,” Rogan offered.

“You know, the wind is rushing, the things are blowing. It’s a vibration and it makes noise. You know what it is? I want to be a whale psychiatrist. It drives the whales freaking crazy and something happens with them. But for whatever reason, they’re getting washed up on shore, you know. And yet —”

“Conveniently ignored by the environmental people,” Rogan finished.

Climate change was not on the discussion list here, as you might surmise. Still, surviving Trump’s three hours on “The Joe Rogan Experience” has some value to his listeners who, for whatever reason, wanted to hear the Republican candidate and 34-count felon “freeball it,” as Rogan called Trump’s verbal meanderings.

Let other swing-state suckers wait in freezing weather for an audience with the Great Pumpkin. Rogan, affable bro that he is, made Trump’s barely decipherable “weave” audible, if not intellectually accessible, from whichever comfortable place a listener prefers to receive the unfiltered blathering of a 78-year-old would-be autocrat.

The minimal editing is the selling point for the politician and Rogan’s listeners, who, according to a recent Gallup survey’s results, are among the 69% of Americans who trust the mass media “not very much” or “not at all. 

Rogan has refused to describe himself as Trump-leaning and in 2020 endorsed Bernie Sanders. He also notoriously promoted COVID-19 misinformation and maintains his anti-vaccination views, which he touched upon briefly when he mentioned vaccine-derived polio during their conversation about the disease reemerging in Gaza.

As he told Trump and recurring guests Eddie Bravo, Brendan Schaub and Bryan Callen on his Sunday episode, his view of handling politicians is to make conversation instead of playing to their talking points, which I agree with. Trump, he told his guests, was difficult to wrangle: “You ask him a question, and he starts to answer it, but then he takes you on a totally different route,” he said. “You’ve got to bring him back in, but you got to be respectful.”

Part of that respect in Rogan’s view is to lay off calling Trump a dictator. Later on Sunday, Trump was the headliner at a Madison Square Garden rally where Tony Hinchcliffe, a comic who Rogan suggested on an August podcast that Trump’s campaign should hire, warmed up the crowd by calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” along with racist jokes about Black and Latino people.

He’s been branded, transphobic, homophobic and anti-feminist and refers to women as “chicks.” And he still hopes Vice President Kamala Harris will agree to appear on an upcoming show.

If reach is what she’s looking for, Rogan’s invitation would seem to be a magnetizing one. “The Joe Rogan Experience” reaches some 17.9 million YouTube subscribers and 15.7 million followers on Spotify, where it is the platform’s No. 1 podcast, as it is on Apple. As of Monday evening, the episode had 35.5 million views on YouTube.

But that doesn’t appear to be her closing podcast strategy, evidenced in her choice to spend a straightforward hour with Shannon Sharpe tossing her policy softballs on “Club Shay Shay.”

In the days since Rogan’s Trump episode went live on Friday (as in, almost immediately after it was recorded) a handful of mainstream news outlets dutifully churned out the standard fact-checking list since it was a given that Rogan wouldn’t challenge Trump on anything he said.

What I found more useful was to look at what Rogan asked Trump and what he agreed with, presumably in the name of the conversations he prizes over standard journalistic interviews.

During last Friday’s episode, he lumped election fraud claims into the same pile as anti-vaxxer rhetoric, calling it a “forbidden topic.” The suggestion of anything taboo is candy to the Extremely Online, and styling the Big Lie as such gives power to the groundwork being laid to doubt any wins that don’t favor Republicans, especially Trump.

Trump’s near admission to Rogan that he lost the 2020 election has been widely reported. Rogan’s framing, meanwhile, doesn’t receive much mention. “I want to talk about 2020 because you said over and over again that you were robbed in 2020. . . How do you think you were robbed?” he asked. Trump starts to mention papers, and Rogan presses him: “But give me some examples of how. Let’s start at the top, and the easy ones.”

Somehow the easy ones were allegations of Russian collusion somehow related to Hunter Biden’s laptop and supposed ballot box chicanery.

“So that’s two examples that are real examples,” Rogan said. “Now, anyone who considers himself a legitimate, objective observer of American politics, if you really want the best person to win, you would want people to not lie. And the only reason why they got away with this lie was because they continually labeled you as this horrible threat to democracy.”

He continued, “They kept saying you were going to be a dictator, ignoring the fact that you weren’t a dictator for the four years where you were actually the president.”

In the name of conversation, Rogan parroted debunked anti-migrant rhetoric in asking Trump for his take on border policy: “In San Antonio, they’ve taken over apartment buildings,” he said. “In Aurora, Colorado, they’ve taken over apartment buildings. These Venezuelan gangs, just the beginning.” Referring to the Democrats, Rogan asked, “What do you think the strategy is?”

When Trump didn’t have an answer, Rogan repeated, “We should just tell people what the strategy is.” That there is no nefarious strategy concerning undocumented migrants crossing the border doesn’t occur to Rogan; there’s always something. So again he insists, “There’s a strategy that’s involved in letting these people in,” pointing to an app used by cartels.

Then at long last, Trump cobbled together…something.

“And now it’s used to deal with the cartels, the cartel, heads of the cartel, rich people. By the way, these are loaded…these people have so much money, they would call up — think of this. They call up the app and the app tells them where they should take their load of illegal migrants from the Congo. You know, we have a lot from the Congo, prisons in the Congo. I made a little bit of a sarcastic joke. A man named Dana White, who you love, who I love. I assume you love him.”

At that point, Trump’s weave stumbled into a lengthy back and forth about the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO and Rogan’s observations about fighters.

I will give Rogan a bit of credit, though. In addition to prodding Trump on topics with little bearing on current events, like opening the file on John F. Kennedy, he also flatly asked Trump, since he says he has so much evidence that it was rigged, “Why haven’t you put this evidence in a consumable form?” The answer, somehow is, “What’s happened is judges don’t want to touch it. They would say you don’t have standing. They didn’t rule on the merits. They. The merits never got there. The judges didn’t have what it took to turn over.”

By now we know what Trump had to gain from sitting down with Rogan, whose listenership is overwhelmingly male (to the tune of somewhere between 71% according to 2020 data from Media Monitors, and 81% according to YouGov) and young; the average listener’s age is 24.

In contradicting his past stance concerning Trump – in 2022 he told fellow podcaster Lex Fridman that he wasn’t a Trump fan and had no intention to feature him — Rogan further cements his dominance in podcasting and found common ground with Trump, which isn’t a stretch. They’re both entertainers, businessmen and effective doubt-sowers.

Rogan has a disdain for mainstream journalism, referring to consumers who watch broadcast and cable news as “low information people.” During their chat, Rogan describes the mass media as a creepy, corrupt business that “to a large extent, acts as a propaganda arm for the Democratic Party.”

“It’s bizarre to watch. And most young people, I think, are aware of it,” Rogan said, explaining to Trump, who pretended not to know why he drew more publicity than other candidates in 2016, that “the Internet’s giving people information that they’re not getting from anywhere else.” 

But that episode also shows what they’re not getting, which is accurate information. Some of it is easy to disprove on its surface, as when he opened by softening up Trump by pointing to what he says in an episode of “The View” from 2015 or 2016 where “Whoopi Goldberg gives you a big hug and a kiss. Joy Behar gives you a big hug. Barbara Walters gives you a big hug. They all loved you . . .  And then you actually started winning in the polls, and then the machine started working towards you.”

“There’s probably no one in history that I’ve ever seen that’s been attacked the way you’ve been attacked and the way they’ve done it so coordinated and systematically, when you see those same people in the past, very favorable to you,” Rogan said.

Later he added, “If you watch the episode, it’s bananas. It’s like an alternative universe. And it’s only nine years ago!” Except .  . . it wasn’t. The episode Rogan referenced aired in 2011, and it’s “The View” segment where he first takes his birther conspiracy claims against then-President Barack Obama to a mainstream audience, toying with a presidential run in the same chat.

Many things happened in the years since that changed the way Goldberg and the rest of “The View” hosts saw Trump. Walters retired in 2014, for example (another clue Rogan’s big revelation doesn’t hold) and Trump hadn’t yet descended his golden escalator and called Mexicans rapists and drug mules. Rogan, it seems, only remembers the part about him barely conceding that some, he assumes, “are good people.”

There is something to Rogan’s take that conversations have a way of getting more honest and unscripted answers out of a guest.

Analysts are correct in noting that mainstream journalists can learn from the conversational bent taken by podcast hosts. I’ve said as much previously that it serves voters to learn as much about who candidates are as it does to have them spell out their policy positions, and a decent host can do both.

But this also is highly reliant on the host’s relationship with facts based on empirical data and whether they’re more interested in being liked or making their guests likable instead of being honest and questioning whether what they’re hearing is honest. Trump meandered, but Rogan skipped right alongside him.

I didn’t expect anything less, but it’s not unreasonable to hope for a mote skepticism from the guy who two years ago said of his guest, “I don’t want to help him. I have no interest in helping him” as his reason for not having Trump on before.

Fridman smoothly and somewhat prophetically replied, “The night is still young.”

Indeed. In 2022 the Doomsday Clock still had 100 seconds on it when those two spoke. In 2023 the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists shifted the countdown to 90.

Here we are a few clicks from midnight of a presidential campaign Trump has been mounting in some form since 2011, and the world is ending. But that’s just what a few scientists say  . . . and what do they know?