Joe Rogan Is Now the Donald Trump of the Comedy World

Post-election, I’ve listened to a few episodes of The Joe Rogan Show, mostly because if this guy is going to be part of the cultural narrative, I want to know what he’s saying. So far, I’ve learned that the episodes are three or four interminable hours long. I’ve listened to maybe four episodes and heard Rogan say the same things in nearly every episode. It’s pretty much what you’d expect if you’ve caught any clips of the show over the years.

He talks a lot about politics, whether his guests want to or not. He’s still preoccupied with COVID-era restrictions years after they were lifted, dismisses almost all legitimate news reporting as conspiratorial, and really seems to hate Tim Walz. That last point is baffling because his reasoning feels absurdly petty: Rogan claims Walz lied about being a head football coach instead of an assistant and about being in Tiananmen Square during the protests when he only visited months later. He thinks these lies would disqualify him to work at McDonalds. But Joe, the former and incoming president literally lied about the size of his inauguration crowd—something we all saw with our own eyes—and hasn’t stopped lying since. But sure: That nice man from Minnesota who spent 20 years in the National Guard but called a gun a “weapon or war” despite never battling in a war is the real problem.

Rogan’s brain is conspiratorial sludge. He believes Biden stole the 2020 election and thinks Trump, upon returning to office, will uncover the evidence (assuming Biden hasn’t destroyed it). He’s also obsessed with the idea that Biden or the “Deep State” orchestrated an assassination attempt on Trump. He’s ranted about this in three of the four episodes I’ve heard, alleging as evidence the fact that the shooter had no toxicology report, was cremated after 10 days, and had no social media footprint. I’ll give him this much: He concedes that he is conspiratorial, and admires the conspiratorial nature of his guests, too. The simplest explanation is never correct: It must involve layers of deep-state shenanigans laundered by the mainstream media and covered up by the same all-powerful Democrats who couldn’t convince Mitch McConnell to allow them to nominate a Supreme Court justice during the last six months of the Obama term.

Like many people trapped in social media bubbles, Rogan’s view of the left is so warped he thinks the mainstream Democratic Party is defined by its most fringe elements. He rants that we supposedly believe in LGBTQH rights (with “H” for Hamas), that women’s prisons are overrun with mentally ill men pretending to be trans women, and that we control the entire mainstream media—ignoring the dominance of Fox News, X, and Facebook. He’s a classic Boomer in mentality, a Fox News grandpa minus the nieces and grandkids to push back. (I’ll grant him one point: his criticism that aligning with Dick and Liz Cheney was a mistake is fair enough.)

Debating Rogan and his “debate-me-bro” followers feels pointless because his conspiratorial bubble is so easy to puncture. The problem is that no one on his show bothers to challenge him. Instead, he sinks deeper into his swamp of misinformation.

The real issue with Rogan is how out of touch he’s become. He’s a billionaire who literally talks about moving his podcast to a ranch with a helicopter pad and a shooting range. His reality is shaped almost entirely by social media, and there’s little to no pushback. Even guests who disagree mostly laugh off his fringe beliefs and try to change the subject. It’s obvious that most of them don’t want to talk politics, vaccines, or cancel culture—they just want to hang out and shoot the shit, but they feel obliged to indulge him. It’s his show and his 15 million listeners, even if many of them also complain about how radicalized he has become on the Rogan subreddit.

He would deny it vehemently, but Rogan has essentially become the Trump of the comedy world. He doesn’t explicitly demand loyalty, but many of his hangers-on owe their careers to him and would never cross him for fear of losing everything. It’s eerily reminiscent of how Trump fills his cabinet with loyalists. Rogan preaches constantly against cancel culture, yet he brags about cutting people out of his life over their political beliefs. He’s literally canceling people for not aligning with his views on cancel culture.

Ultimately, Joe Rogan has become a caricature of the out-of-touch, wealthy, contrarian Boomer, clinging to grievances and conspiracy theories while surrounding himself with sycophants who won’t challenge his delusions. For someone who once claimed to thrive on open dialogue, Rogan now seems trapped in a world where his own perspective is the only one that matters — a world detached from a reality he so claims to represent.