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4 Takeaways from Joe Rogan’s Interview with Donald Trump

October 28, 2024

Over the course of his 2024 campaign, former President Donald Trump has launched a series of podcast interviews, ranging from lengthy policy discussions with the likes of tech billionaire Elon Musk to fun and freewheeling conversations with comedians like Theo Von. On Friday, Trump sat down for a marathon three-hour podcast episode with the popular comedian and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) commentator Joe Rogan. As of Monday, the “Joe Rogan Experience” episode has over 33 million views on YouTube, while Vice President Kamala Harris’s eight-minute interview on the female-oriented sex podcast “Call Her Daddy,” which was published on October 7, has roughly 716,000 views on YouTube.

Trump and Rogan covered a broad range of subjects, with the former president often relying on a rhetorical technique that he calls “the weave,” moving from one subject to another by means of anecdotes and observations, while still returning to the discussion’s original starting point. Here are four of the most important moments from and about the interview:

1. Trump is a history buff.

Prior to the advent of independent media and influential podcasts, it was rare for a presidential candidate to have a platform where he could talk for three hours straight, uninterrupted. Mainstream media interviews and even presidential debates often zero in on 10-second bites, giving candidates for the highest office in the land only two or three minutes to respond to questions and share their thoughts. But on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” Trump had an opportunity to showcase not just his rhetorical prowess but the depth and breadth of his knowledge on a number of subjects, especially American history.

The former president devoted a solid period of time to talking about the American Civil War. Trump explained that when he first moved into the White House in 2017, he asked to see Abraham Lincoln’s bedroom. He then recounted the troubled marriage between the 16th president and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. The two suffered from “melancholia,” Trump said, noting that today we would call the condition “depression.” Trump said that when he entered the Lincoln bedroom, he sought out a small photo of Lincoln’s youngest son, Tad, who had died at the age of 18. Tad’s death, in conjunction with the prior deaths of Willie Lincoln at the age of 11 and Eddie Lincoln at the age of only three, contributed to the strain on the Lincolns’ marriage.

“He was a very depressed guy,” Trump said of Lincoln. “And she was a very depressed woman, more so than him. And on top of that, they lost their son, whose name was Tad. And it was just seeing him in the little pictures, a little tiny picture, and you can’t see the details, they’re a little tiny. In with everything, though, was a little tiny picture of Tad, who he lost. And it was devastating.”

Trump also spoke of Lincoln’s personal difficulties in combatting the Confederate Army, led by General Robert E. Lee, in the Civil War. “Lee won like 13 battles in a row. And [Lincoln] was getting like a phobia, like a fighter — you know a lot about the fight stuff,” Trump told Rogan. “But Lincoln had the yips about it in a way, as the golfers would say. He had a phobia about Robert E. Lee, he said, ‘I can’t beat Robert because Robert E. Lee won many battles in a row.’”

The former president then shifted his attention to Lee. “You know, they tried to get Robert E. Lee to be on the North. But he said, ‘No, I have to be with my state.’ You know, the state was his whole thing,” Trump explained. He continued to explain that, during his presidency, he found some of the best military generals to have the highest respect for Lee. “I’ve had generals tell me — we have some great generals, the real generals, not the ones you see on television, the ones that beat ISIS with me. We defeated ISIS in record time. It was supposed to take years. And we did it in a matter of weeks,” Trump recalled. He continued, “These are great generals; these are tough guys — these are not woke guys. But their favorite general in terms of genius was Robert E. Lee. … He took a war that should have been over in a few days and it was years of hell, a vicious war.”

The intricate knowledge of American history displayed by Trump was punctuated by his reverence for the United States. “The biggest thing was just that first moment of being in this hallowed — it was really a hallowed place to me,” he said of first entering the White House. “It was surreal. It was beyond… To me, that was the experience. It was a surreal experience.”

2. Trump is energized.

In a later interview, Rogan discussed the most impressive aspects of interviewing Trump. Chief among them was the former president’s high energy. “He’s got this ability to just keep going,” Rogan noted. He continued, “This is what’s crazy — the podcast was three hours long, the guy didn’t pee before the podcast, he didn’t pee after the podcast, he just left.” As Rogan and Trump approached the three-hour mark on Monday’s podcast, Trump abruptly ended the interview and announced that he had to leave for a campaign event — in Michigan. Rogan’s podcast studio is in Texas.

During the interview, Trump shared that he had been campaigning non-stop for the previous two months. “I haven’t taken a day off in 56 days. That’s a long time. I haven’t taken one day off. I don’t want to play golf, this is too exciting. Golf is great, but this is too exciting. This is more exciting than anything you can do,” Trump said. He continued, “Who would take a day off? So we have 11 days left now, think of it. So I think I’ve gone 54, 55 days in a row. No days off. And I make speeches oftentimes.” He noted that he had been at a campaign rally in Las Vegas the night before and one in Arizona the day before that and had made speeches at both.

“And my speeches last a long time, because of the weave. I weave stories into it. And if you don’t, if you just read a teleprompter, nobody’s going to be very excited. You’ve got to weave it out,” he explained, referring to his penchant for storytelling and comedic commentary while campaigning. “The weave is very, very important. Very few weavers around. But it’s a big strain… It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. You’ve got to be careful with the voice. You can lose that voice.”

Referring to his campaign events, Trump relayed, “I mean, they’re all big. There’s never been anything like it in terms of [the] crowd[s]. Never been close, never been close, they say. You talk about crowd size. You know, it’s very interesting. So we get crowds that are really big.” On Sunday night, Trump hosted a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The arena, which seats 19,500, was sold out. Multiple reports suggested that the New York Police Department estimated an additional 75,000 people were outside the venue, hoping to get in.

3. Trump admits mistakes.

Left-wing pundits, politicians, and operatives often claim that Trump is narcissistic and arrogant, but he readily admitted many of his first administration’s mistakes to Rogan. The former president’s top regret, he said, is appointing the wrong people to positions of power. Trump explained that the president is involved in approximately 10,000 appointments, although many are often delegated to the cabinet secretaries and agency directors that he appoints. “How did you know who to appoint?” Rogan asked. Trump replied, “Well, I didn’t. I had no experience.”

“I wasn’t a Washington guy, I was a New York guy. I was a New York builder, and I built buildings in New York. And I knew that whole world, but I didn’t know the Washington world too well,” Trump recounted. He continued, “I had to rely on people that I respected or liked, but that I didn’t know that well. … Some of those people I campaigned against … but I got to like some of them. Some of them I didn’t like at all, and I don’t like them now. And I’d rely on them and I’d rely on other people.”

Rogan asked, “Did you have a moment in time where you realized, like, these are bad choices? Like, ‘Some of these people I shouldn’t have had in there.’” Trump quickly answered, “Oh, yeah. I think so.” He explained that although he had numerous “good picks,” including three U.S. Supreme Court justices who eventually overturned Roe v. Wade, his “bad picks” were more noticeable. “I picked some great people, you know, but you don’t think about that. I picked some people that I shouldn’t have picked, I picked a few people that I shouldn’t have picked,” Trump said, describing those “bad picks” as “neocons or bad people or disloyal people or just bad people.”

One of the “bad picks” Trump named was former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who Trump classified as “a bully, but a weak person.” Kelly recently spoke to The Atlantic magazine and compared his former boss to Adolf Hitler, in a story largely discredited by the very sources it cited. Trump also admitted that his National Security Advisor John Bolton was a poor pick, in a way. “Bolton was an idiot, but he was great for me,” Trump said. He explained, “He’s a nut job, but every time I had to deal with a country, when they saw this whack job standing behind me, they said, ‘Oh man, Trump’s going to go to war with us.’”

4. Trump will do things differently if he wins.

According to Trump himself, his biggest mistake during his first term was appointing and trusting the wrong people. But he’s clearly determined not to make that same mistake again and has surrounded himself with people whom he trusts. One example of this is his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). Trump told Rogan, “I think he was a great pick. Do you like J.D.? I like him a lot.” Rogan replied that Vance is “a brilliant guy” and added that one of his greatest strengths is “his ability to talk like a normal human being.”

Another of the people Trump has chosen to trust is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “I love this idea of you teaming up with Robert Kennedy, and I love this Make America Healthy Again idea, because there are chemicals and ingredients that are in our food that are illegal in other countries because they’ve been shown to be toxic,” Rogan told Trump. He added, “There’s pesticides and herbicides and there’s a lot of s*** that’s been sprayed on our food that really is unnecessary. And there’s a lot of health consequences that people are suffering from a lot of these things.” Trump agreed and said that Kennedy is “a great guy” and that Trump is committed to having him play a role in a second administration. That role, however, would be limited to the subject of health. “But the only thing I want to be a little careful about with him is the environmental, because, you know, he doesn’t like oil. I love oil and gas,” Trump quipped. “So I’m going to sort of keep him out of that a little. I said, ‘Focus on health. You can do whatever you want. But I got to be a little bit careful with the liquid gold.’”

Trump also admitted that he has been pressured, mostly by pharmaceutical executives, not to partner with Kennedy. “I would say that Big Pharma wasn’t thrilled when they heard that, you know,” Trump said. “I’ve known him a long time. He’s a different kind of a guy, he’s very smart, great guy. And he’s very sincere about this. I mean, he really is. You know, he thinks we spend a fortune on pesticides and all this stuff.”

Although all of the former president’s children have been involved with his businesses or his campaign or administration at various times, Trump singled out his youngest son, Barron, as a key player in helping him appeal to young voters. Barron has, namely, been arranging for Trump to appear on podcasts popular with young men. “I have a son who’s very smart and tall, Barron, and he knows all about you,” Trump told Rogan. “He knows about guys I never heard of. He said, ‘Dad, you don’t know how big they are. They’re big.’ You know, he told me how big. I said, ‘Who the hell is he?’ … It’s a whole new world out there.”

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.



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