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Donald Trump’s podcast bonanza just paid off with the biggest win possible: a formal endorsement from Joe Rogan, whose massive audience has been coveted by both Trump and Kamala Harris in the final days of the election.
In Rogan’s latest episode, with top Trump surrogate and X CEO Elon Musk, the two talked for almost three hours in Rogan’s Austin studio — standard fare for his show, which was apparently too much for the sitting vice president, whose team would only agree to an hour-long interview on the road, which never occurred. But the most important takeaway came when Rogan posted the episode, along with his commentary. “If it wasn’t for [Musk] we’d be fucked,” Rogan wrote. “He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way. For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump.”
Trump, Rogan said, is “so crazy, that if you tell him he can’t be president,” as Seth Meyers did during an infamous White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech, he will go “‘OK motherfucker’” and do it. Musk, it turns out, was at that dinner.
For weeks, Musk and his America PAC have been making the case for Trump from Michigan to Madison Square Garden. On Rogan, Musk — while donning a trademark “Occupy Mars” shirt — stumped for Trump and against the Democratic Party in between discussions about video game-playing surgeons, Alex Jones, his latest awe-inspiring “chopsticks” rocket catch, Barack Obama’s chef, Hillary Clinton’s alleged body count, Peanut the Squirrel, Anthony Fauci — whom Rogan called a “monster” — and the dangers of George Soros-funded prosecutors.
“If Trump doesn’t win, this’ll be the last real election in America,” Musk said, to Rogan’s agreement.
“They’re doing all of the things that they accuse Trump of doing,” Musk said, as the pair discussed the litany of Biden administration lawsuits targeting Musk’s vast business empire. “The sheer number of hoaxes that the Democratic Party is pushing over and over again,” including that Trump wants Liz Cheney to be shot, that Trump said that there are “very fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville — which Joe Biden said was the original impetus for his 2020 presidential campaign, and which Obama just invoked on the trail. “I was like what the flying fuck?” Musk said.
“Thank you so much for buying Twitter,” Rogan said at one point to Musk. “I’m not exaggerating when I think you changed the course of history. I really do. You made a fork in the road, we were headed down a path of censorship and a control of narratives that is unprecedented.” Rogan noted that YouTube “did something weird, they won’t say what they did,” with the post of his interview of Trump. “There’s no excuse for that,” Musk said. “Thank God we put it on X as well,” Rogan said — he even credited Musk with helping move Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta back to the center.
“Community Notes is the best; it’s incredible,” Rogan gushed.
Rogan has been a longtime fan of Musk’s, repeatedly comparing him favorably to Iron Man, but doing The Joe Rogan Experience hasn’t always been without risk for Musk; during one infamous appearance in 2018, he smoked weed with Rogan and Tesla’s stock plummeted as a result.
While Musk did materially harm Tesla during one of his appearances on Rogan, the two men both defended the $44 billion deal to buy Twitter as proof of Musk’s business acumen. Much of the criticism of the deal, they said, comes from bitter journalists and organizations with “Orwellian names,” like the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which Musk tried to sue earlier this year. “They’re like the Ministry of Truth,” Musk said, predicting that if Trump wins, that much of the remaining advertiser boycott will lift.
Musk’s appearance — and Rogan’s subsequent endorsement of Trump — marks the death knell in Harris’s awkward courtship with Rogan, a former Bernie Sanders 2020 voter. If the richest man in the world, who is spending millions of his own dollars to attempt to elect Trump, can appear on Rogan the day before the election, surely Harris could have found the time to do so during her bizarre campaign swing through Texas.
But it’s not just Musk who made it awkward; Harris’s fellow Democrat, Senator John Fetterman, just sat down with Musk too. Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, also sat down with the podcaster in recent weeks.
Trump has been rolling out endorsements from other top podcasters in recent weeks. His former foe, Megyn Kelly, just endorsed him as well — as did the roast comic Tony Hinchcliffe, himself a Rogan alum, although his joke about Puerto Rico being an island of “garbage” likely harmed Trump more than his endorsement helped him.
Rogan’s Musk interview also caps a remarkable string of success for the podcaster in terms of breaking into the legacy media’s coverage. If Trump ends up winning tomorrow, powered by a surge in support from young male voters who were unlikely to turn out, Harris will probably regret appearing on Saturday Night Live and turning down The Joe Rogan Experience.
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