Post election, the media pointed to a three hour long interview by Joe Rogan of Donald Trump on the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” as an especially positive influence on young men and other folks who might not otherwise have voted at all. Much of the same media criticized Kamala Harris for declining a Rogan interview.
In late November a friend reported that, out of curiosity, she had watched “at least an hour” of the Rogan/Trump podcast. She reported that “He [Trump] does not come across as the same person at his rallies… He [Rogan] asks soft questions, but also harder ones; more of two guys just talking.” I would add, however, that Rogan enables Trump’s ignorance.
One cannot know, of course, how Rogan would have approached Kamala Harris as a guest on his show. Combing the wikipedia article on “The Joe Rogan Experience” I can find mention of only two female guests having ever appeared on his show: Tulsi Gabbard (as she was running for President as a Republican in 2020) and Mikhaila Peterson, the daughter of a controversially-conservative Canadian intellectual. Male notables among Rogan’s podcast guests include far right figures like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos. On the other hand, before the 2020 primaries Rogan interviewed—and said he “would probably vote for”—Bernie Sanders.
The three hour Trump interview on the Rogan podcast (#2219) is available on YouTube here. It is an important—and disturbing—cultural artifact that racked up 41 million clicks between mid-October when it was recorded and October 31, 2024. It is easy to imagine, for all its manifest inanity and misinformation, that the interview humanized Trump as a “bro” for just enough disaffected, disconnected, young (and older) men—and some women—to have gotten them out to vote and tip the election in Trump’s favor. (Never mind that a net 3.2 million voters who participated in the 2020 election were AWOL for 2024. Voter suppression? Misogyny? Racism? Too busy? We’ll never know for sure.)
Trump, as demonstrated in the transcript below (and throughout the interview), is absolutely confident in his ignorance and his imagined intellectual superiority. Many of his staunchest supporters subscribe to his ignorance while many “public intellectuals” cannot believe that Trump is actually as ignorant as what he plainly demonstrates. Unable to comprehend his ignorance, they suggest he is engaging in sarcasm or somehow playing three-dimensional chess. We saw this in his first term when, during a Covid press conference, he very seriously suggested to Dr. Birx that scientists should investigate using disinfectant or UV light “inside the body” to combat the virus—and White House spokespeople and the press labelled his words “sarcasm”.
Similarly, in his first term, Trump proposed “sweeping” the forests as an essential solution for wildfires. (Of course, for Trump, anyone who questions his “sweeping” proposal, especially those evil, deluded “environmentalists,” are to blame for wildfire devastation. Blame is always central for him in what passes for thought.)
So this brings us to the lengthy Rogan interview. Rogan provides the lead-in for Trump to expound on his solutions for California’s water problems and for wildfires—and, of course, as an opportunity to demean anyone who expresses an opinion contrary to his inanity. Click on this link to the Rogan interview and watch starting at about 1:01:40 (and/or read the transcript below).
JR: Did you know the center of California was a giant lake?
DJT: They have so much water!
JR: Did you ever see what it looks like? Before they re-routed it?
DJT: No, I never saw that.
JR: The center of California, like, what was it? two hundred years ago? [turning to someone off camera]. How long ago did they do that, Jamie? The center of California had a f__king enormous lake. In the middle of California.
DJT: So they dumped it into the Pacific…
JR: Who knows what they did, but whatever foolishness that they did it led to the situation they’re in now.
DJT: Think of those dry forests that burn that burn down all of the [pause] You know the head of Austria said, you know [JR cuts him off]
JR: There it is [looking at a side screen] Tulare Lake or Tache Lake, [reading] “It’s a freshwater lake in the San Joaquin Valley United States, historically, Tulare Lake was one of the largest freshwater lakes west of the Mississippi.” Show a photo of what it looked like back then. That’s what it looked like back then. [Jamie puts up a screen of Google illustrations of central CA]
JR: Go to the one on the third from the right.
At this point the computer screen in shows this illustration of a lake covering the whole Central Valley of California—never mind that this was hundreds of thousands of years ago—a geological feature:
JR: [going on] That was an enormous lake in the middle of California.
DJT: Imagine that. That’d be much more valuable property.
JR: How crazy is that? Human beings screwed that up
DJT: They let it go into the Pacific, then they
JR: [Interrupting] I dunno what they did. What did they do why they- how did it go missing?
Jamie [off camera]: They drained it, they [unintelligible]
DJT: They drained it.
JR: 1983, oh my God. Oh, went dry a handful of times. [Listening to a voice off camera] Well, ya know, lakes do go dry but that’s a big one. It’s a big one to go dry.
Rogan and Trump are conflating the huge prehistoric Lake Corcoran of hundreds of thousands of years ago with its tiny remnant in the southwest corner of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Thanks to centuries of a generally drying climate, that remnant, Lake Tulare, was what was left of Lake Corcoran long before any humans even appeared in the Americas. Man’s activities had nothing to do with the drainage of Lake Corcoran. But sober facts never get in the way of Donald Trump’s need to tear down anyone who even hints that he might not know what he’s talking about:
DJT: You have all of the water you need. All of that land would have more water, the whole thing could be like that little patch, literally, I’d say—I was with Devin Nunes, a congressman, and other congressmen. We were going up, I was visiting that because they asked me to go up and visit their territory and I did. But I kept saying, “Look at this land. It’s beautiful, but it’s so dry.” And I thought they were going through a desert like a drought. But no, they said we have water but it gets [garbles]—so I looked into it and I got it done. I could have water for all of that land, water for your forests, you know your forests are dry as a bone OK? Water could be routed, you could have everything.
JR: Dangerous
DJT: Not only dangerous… Billions of dollars a year they spend on forest fires, and, you know, there’s a case with the environment, they’re not allowed to rake their forests, ‘cause they’re not allowed to touch it, when a tree falls down after eighteen months it becomes very dry, you know, like real firewood it’s bad. Ya know a tree that’s up. These are all things I learned the hard way—the easy way [interrupting himself]. But when a tree is up it sucks water, it’s wet. I went to that a couple of horrible forest fires in California and I went, I said, you know, you’ve got a lot of trees standing, yes, they said, “They were healthy trees, sir.” With this intense heat, you could see they were charred a little bit on the bottom but they were going to be alright because they’re soaking wet because they suck up the water, right? But when they fall they’re like, you—it’s like lighting a match…and you gotta be able to clean—they call it “maintain your forests”. So I was with the head of Austria. He said, “You know it’s a shame I see all those forest fires in California and all they have to do is clean their forests.” Meaning rake it up, get rid of the leaves, ya know, the leaves that are sitting there for five years.
JR: The deadfall.
DJT: And get rid of the trees that have fallen, ya know that are like—so many things, this country
JR: I don’t think you could rake your whole forest. I think you could get rid the deadfall, but raking all the leaves…
DJT: You could certainly get rid of the dead. Ya know, environmentally they don’t wanna do that, they say it’s gotta be nature and all this stuff. But in the meantime, this is exactly, but you could have… It was the Department of Commerce that needed the approvals but Gavin Newsome hadda sign ‘em. I got it all done. Nobody could believe it. It was all done. I said, “I got it. You for so much water. All you have to do is sign [pause] and that guy didn’t wanna sign.
JR: Did he not want to sign because that would be a political victory for you?
DJT: No, I don’t think so, he, ya know, he used to say, “He’s a great President.” and we got along well, we did, we actually got along at that point, but I think somebody said, “You just can’t continue to call him a great President.” You know, they do say that. But we had it all done. And he didn’t sign and we got onto other things and every time I go to California I say, “You have so much water.” They don’t know it. I’m tellin’ you, people living in Beverly Hills they turn off their water. Same thing with the electric. They wanna go all electric cars, but they have brownouts every weekend.
Then they roll on to electric cars and Trump’s assertion that he will “terminate the mandate” for electric cars.
Joe Rogan and Donald Trump are entertainers. Their expertise is in running their mouths in entertaining ways, not dealing with facts. If either of them were even remotely curious about facts and reality this interview would not have happened. That Donald Trump, terrifyingly smug in his profound ignorance, will once again be president, this time with fewer guard rails, is reason for the world to weep.
It is long since past time for the media and everyone around Trump to quit giving him a pass on his prideful ignorance before he drives the world into a ditch. “Sane-washing” doesn’t cover it. His words are not insane. He has the story-telling capability and aura of authority of a Ronald Reagan (also an entertainer with a history in movies and TV) combined with the feral instincts and intellect of a developmentally stunted second grader. (My apology to all second graders whose curiosity outweighs their feral instincts.)
Buckle up. It’s going to be a rough ride.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. If you want more clarity on Joe Rogan I recommend reading this article in Rolling Stone from 2015 (If you’re over the limit you will encounter a paywall.) The wikipedia articles (click to read) on “The Joe Rogan Experience” and Joe Rogan are also useful.