I’ve Listened to 170 Hours of Joe Rogan’s Podcast – Trust Me, He Didn’t Turn Against Trump | Michael Marshall

Joe Rogan, the world’s most famous podcaster, struggles with sleep. In an interview last week, he complained that the “madness” of the news cycle — from the launch of Epstein’s library, to US military strikes on Iran — had “overwhelmed” him. For some, the admission is just the latest sign that the world’s most famous podcaster may regret his role in encouraging Donald Trump back into office.

This comes after apparent harsh criticism of ICE following the killing of Renee Nicole Goode. Rogan compared ICE to the Gestapo in a short clip that went viral. This has prompted this newspaper to reasonably ask “Is Joe Rogan quite soured on a Trump presidency?”, as ABC, Bloomberg and CNN have all recently reported on Rogan’s apparent disapproval of ICE.

Seeing Rogan lose confidence in the political leader he championed in the White House would be a major blow to Trump, given how influential Rogan’s support has been since they met during the 2024 campaign.

But the Gestapo clip is from Rogan’s three-hour interview with Senator Rand Paul on January 13, and does not reflect the entire thrust of their conversation. Rogan portrays ICE’s existence as a direct response to mass “fraud” in Minnesota, justifies ICE’s need for complete anonymity to carry out its work, warns that “one of the real problems” is that ICE may be wrongly viewed as the bad guys, and expresses sympathy for ICE agents.

While Rogan laments Judd’s shooting as “unfortunate,” she says she “seemed crazy” and “out of her fucking mind,” speculating that she was a deliberate instigator. The feelings of someone who is terrified of using deadly force against an innocent civilian are hardly sleepless nights.

I know all this because I’ve listened to over 170 hours of Joe Rogan, on the Know Rogan Experience podcast. There, we try to understand and explain the platform of prolific misinformation.

In the same episode Rogan He does He says he hates seeing people snatched off the streets, but makes the case for the need, given that Democrats are flooding swing states with illegal immigrants in order to “hijack” the democratic system.

The idea of ​​using illegal immigration to subvert democracy has been a recurring theme on Rogan’s podcast. In October 2024, a week after Rogan’s poignant interview with Trump, he sat down with J.D. Vance, then the vice presidential nominee, who warned that the United States was moving toward a one-party system with Democrats “taking away representation in Congress from American citizens and giving it to illegal aliens.” In February 2025, Elon Musk told him that there was an explicit plan by top Democrats to create a permanent one-party socialist state.

In August 2025, the White House called for a census to exclude illegal immigrants, with Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller accusing Democrats of counting “tens of millions of illegal immigrants” to “[steal] “Home Seats for Sanctuary Cities.”

Immediately, Rogan began bringing it up as a talking point on his show, including in interviews with Ed Calderon, Mariana Van Zeller, Andrew Schulz, Theo Vaughn, James McCann, Andrew Doyle, and Ihsan Ahmed, as well as while watching mixed martial arts. Last month, he told actress Cheryl Hines that 10 million “illegal” immigrants were being allowed into the country to create a “built-in voter base” to “rig the election.”

Whether Rogan realizes it or not, this iteration closely resembles the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory – a narrative commonly associated with the far right. According to believers, wealthy elites are deliberately engineering the mass migration of people of color to white-majority democracies in order to disenfranchise local populations and deprive them of political power. These ideas were once discussed on fringe message boards and in quiet voices at far-right rallies. Rogan now offers a similar theory about the most popular podcasts on the planet.

For the avoidance of doubt, redistricting in the 2020 Census saw red states gain congressional seats at the expense of blue states — continuing the trend of the 2010 and 2000 censuses. Rogan shouldn’t worry: If Democrats are trying to undermine democracy through mass immigration, they’re doing it badly.

A month after the Minnesota murders, Rogan has bolstered his story about how those events were handled. On February 19 he told the Michael Mallis podcast:

They did a great job in Minnesota of distracting people from the Somali fraud by organizing protests against ICE… It’s organized and heavily funded… They knew what they were doing and they did it because they wanted to distract from the fact that this fraud had been exposed. They completely changed the narrative. No one talks about fraud anymore, everyone talks about ICE being killers. You succeeded.

In a lengthy conversation with far-right broadcaster Andrew Wilson, he also described the idea that the protests against ICE are “provable nonsense” — instead, they are a “color revolution” organized by the Minnesota state government to distract from “the evil amount of fraud that has been discovered.” [in Minneapolis]”.

Far from breaking with Trump or “stress” in the administration, Rogan justified the administration’s violence as an understandable response to a deliberate and coordinated provocation, orchestrated in concert with Democratic politicians in order to cover up alleged fraud — a narrative that was echoed in Trump’s State of the Union address and which then shapes the policies announced by the White House.

After spending a year getting to know Rogan, it’s clear that it will take more than just the murders of American citizens to shake the confidence he has in the man he championed to office. What’s also clear is Rogan’s value in repeating and amplifying narratives friendly to the Trump administration’s goals — even those promoting far-right conspiracy theories like The Great Replacement.

Even Trump’s association with Jeffrey Epstein couldn’t shake the foundations of Rogan’s trust — despite out-of-context clips making media headlines with claims that Rogan “again attacked the Trump administration.” In fact, across seven recent shows in which Rogan reacted to the release of 3.5 million documents from Epstein’s library, Trump’s involvement only came up on two occasions: first, when Rogan told Evan Haver that Trump’s initial dismissal of the files as a “hoax” was a bad look (speculating that Trump may not have known how bad Epstein was), and then a week later he told Mallis that Trump had thanked the FBI for arresting Epstein, hence his appearance in the documents.

Rogan appears not to be particularly concerned that Trump is mentioned more than 5,000 times in the documents, with reports indicating that more Trump-related documents have been redacted. In fact, the only time Rogan stopped to consider the extent of Trump’s friendship with Epstein was after the September 2025 revelation of Trump’s infamous birthday book letter to Epstein, which Rogan had to admit sounded creepy — though he hasn’t mentioned it once since.

Whether he likes it or not, Rogan has influence, and he has power – and whether he means it or not, he is using that power to clean up the reputation and actions of Trump and his administration. If we want to understand the outsized influence of the world’s largest podcast platform, we can’t rely on consuming out-of-context clips that seem to tell us what we’d like to be true — we need to pay attention to what Joe Rogan is actually saying. Millions of people are already doing this.