President Donald Trump arguably owes much of his political success to the sympathetic coverage he received from right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan — yet when it comes to the Iran war, Rogan is turning on Trump.
“Well, it just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?” Rogan said during the Tuesday episode of his podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience.” “He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”
Rogan is not limiting his criticisms of Trump to the Iran war. In February he warned the administration that Trump’s ongoing cover up of documents related to the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, with whom Trump was close friends, looks “terrible.”
“Who knows what f — — happens with all this Epstein files s — —,” Rogan said. “It just keeps getting crazier and crazier and crazier and deeper and deeper.”
He added, “Why would your name be redacted if you’re not a victim? Like, this is what’s crazy about all this. Like, how come you redact some people and you don’t redact other people?”
Overall Rogan concluded that Trump’s refusal to be candid about the Epstein scandal “is not good. None of this is good for this administration. It looks f — — terrible. It looks terrible. It looks terrible for Trump when he was saying that none of this was real. This is all a hoax. This is not a hoax. Like, did you not know?"
In January, Rogan also called out Trump for empowering ICE in ways that the podcaster argued violate people’s basic civil liberties.
"One of the real problems is, ICE are villains," Rogan argued. “And people are looking at them like, military people that on the streets of our city. And they're masked up, which is also a problem, right? Because if you get arrested by a cop, you're allowed to ask the cop, 'what is your name and badge number?' And you can film that cop. If you get arrested by an ICE agent, you have no such right. they're wearing a mask. They don't have to tell you s——. That's a problem."
Despite his current willingness to depart from the Trump administration, Rogan has in the past been adamant in his support for MAGA. Speaking with this author for Salon Magazine in 2022, cult expert Dr. Steven Hassan pointed out that Rogan hosted him in 2015 to discuss his book “Combatting Cult Mind Control,” but refused to do the same with his book “The Cult of Trump.”
“I was on Joe Rogan’s show in 2015 regarding my first book ‘Combating Cult Mind Control,'” Hassan recalled. “He loved my work and invited me back. But then when I did ‘The Cult of Trump,’ he passed.”