by Jeff Childers
Last night, right after the record-breaking interview dropped, the New York Times ran a lightning damage-control article headlined, “6 Takeaways From Donald Trump’s 3-Hour Podcast With Joe Rogan.” The face-off between the former Fear Factor and Apprentice hosts forged political history yesterday and dealt the selected candidate a crippling blow from which she may never recover.
SPOTIFY: Joe Rogan Episode #2219 – Donald Trump (2:58).
I could not find a previous historical example of a President (or candidate) taking such a long, open-ended interview with a major media platform. I don’t believe it has ever happened.
Joe Rogan commands the world’s largest media venue, period, full stop. Nothing else even comes close, except possibly a handful of one-off events like the Superbowl. The Times reported Rogan has 14.5 million subscribers on Spotify and 17.6 million on YouTube. Rogan’s shows consistently top the charts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Rogan signed a renewal contract with Spotify earlier this year, estimated by trade press to be worth nearly $250 million, making him the highest paid journalist in history.
Though corporate media does its best to ignore Joe Rogan, the former MMA fighter remains the lone champion of a dominant media class of his own.
The race to score the Rogan interview began twelve days ago. It was Harris’ idea. Reuters ran the story headlined, “Harris could join Joe Rogan podcast in hunt for male votes, sources say.” The Harris campaign is desperate for male voters. A YouGov poll last year found most (81%) of Rogan listeners are male, and just over half (56%) are under 35, so she badly needed the exposure.
Trump has never enjoyed a smooth relationship with Joe Rogan. Two years ago, Rogan refused to let Trump come on the show, and called Trump a “threat to democracy.” Yesterday on the show, Rogan told Trump the assassination attempt changed his mind: “Once they shot you, I was like, ‘He’s got to come in here,’” Rogan explained. “It’s all about timing.”
On Monday, the news broke of Kamala’s talks with Rogan, and it looks like the Trump campaign sprang into action and scooped the interview. Trump had at least one advantage: he could handle three hours of unscripted interview without negotiating a bunch of rules, and Kamala probably could not. So it looks like there is a behind-the-scenes story of how Trump snaked the Rogan interview out from under Kamala’s nose.
Even before the interview began, Trump had already won, by denying Kamala access to Rogan’s show. Rogan says he’d still have her on. But there’s no way she’ll take that interview now, fearing inevitable and predictably brutal comparisons between her’s and Trump’s performance. And that is the point: Trump doesn’t need independents to listen to the interview.
He just needs them to know Trump took the three-hour unscripted interview, and Kamala didn’t or couldn’t. And that may be a sufficiently compelling reason to vote for President Trump, since it really does evidence a basic presidential capability.
In the first nine hours since the podcast went live on YouTube, it has already been viewed 8.3 million times. And there are already 196,000 comments. These figures don’t even count additional listeners on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
As for the content, little will be new to existing Trump supporters. The former President confirmed his plan to end the income tax, albeit without elaborating, which is probably smart. And Trump confessed to Rogan that his biggest mistake during his first term was picking “bad, disloyal people,” showing he’s learned a lot from his first try.
But it was surprising to see how much of the world is with us. The YouTube comments section —which developed overnight— was incredibly encouraging. Foreign Trump fans from all over Planet Earth chimed in, wishing America blessings for the election. Here are just three examples in a row of very many:
The list of supportive countries continued beyond your author’s ability to scroll. While trying to imagine a scenario where any Kamala interview would draw this kind of worldwide response, ask next whether anything the Cackler has done could create this sort of wild energy:
Can anyone realistically envision Kamala enduring a 3-hour interview by someone that was not a sycophantic campaign contributor? She can’t hack 20 minutes with Brett Baier. Yeah, that would be a great place to win back some male votes… if she had the ability. But she would only wind up losing MORE voters.
Who can envision this incompetent loser as President? In the White House? Negotiating on behalf of the American people with world leaders?