Since the start of the nearly two-month war against Iran, some of President Donald Trump’s once-enthusiastic boosters have made a public show of breaking with him, only to be met with blistering Truth Social attacks and further fire from MAGA-aligned personalities.
Yet the most prominent of the podcasters whose embrace of the 45th president played a key role in helping him become the 47th, ex-Fear Factor host and MMA commentator turned Spotify star Joe Rogan, appears immune to Trump’s wrath.
Rogan, who last month called Trump’s decision to launch a new foreign war “insane” and suggested that “a lot of people feel betrayed” because of it, was a surprise celebrity guest at an unannounced executive order signing on Saturday morning, just days after he called the war “f**king terrifying.”
Trump didn’t seem to be bothered by Rogan’s MAGA apostasy as the podcaster stood behind the president in the Oval Office, right next to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to watch as he announced the signing of an order intended to accelerate medical treatments for serious mental illness using psychedelic drugs.
Citing one study about Ibogaine, which posited that participants experienced an “80 to 90 percent reduction in symptoms of depression and anxiety within one month” after being administered the drug, Trump decided to go for some laughs, asking: “Can I have some, please?”
Rogan explained his presence there by telling reporters that he’d been invited after he texted Trump in support of psychedelics — a longtime hobbyhorse for the podcaster and others in his orbit.
“I want to tell everybody how this happened … I sent President Trump some information… the text message that came back: ‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it,’” Rogan said. “It was literally that quick.”
Trump did make a passing reference to Rogan’s criticism over the war, telling reporters that the podcaster was “a little bit more liberal than me and that’s OK.”
That’s OK? Really?
Anyone who has spent much time observing the president’s embrace of Rogan knows he doesn’t react well to criticism of any kind, be it from supporters in his own party or from anyone perceived to be in the opposition.
Consider his reaction to former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene — after she became one of a handful of Republicans to sign on to a discharge petition which led to the House and Senate passing the Epstein Files Transparency Act last year, the president essentially declared her an unperson within the MAGA-era GOP.
He rapidly deployed a rather tortured attempt at a nickname, dubbing her Marjorie Taylor Brown (because “green turns to brown under stress”) and inspiring enough of his followers to threaten her and her family that she decided to take her ball and go home by resigning her House seat at the beginning of January.
Trump also unleashed upon a quartet of his most loyal media allies — Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones — less than two weeks ago after they all offered criticisms of the war he launched against Iran, just as Rogan had done.
He savaged Carlson “a broken man” on account of his being fired from his Fox News show a few years back, and called Owens, once one of his highest-profile Black media supporters, “crazy” while heaping scorn upon her bizarre crusade to convince the world that France’s First Lady, Brigitte Macron, is a man (something she is not).
As for Jones, who he once praised as having an “amazing” reputation, he mocked him as “bankrupt” (a condition Trump knows quite well based on his past business record) and noted that he “says some of the dumbest things,” such as claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre had been a hoax (it was not).
But Trump’s uncharacteristic magnanimity might have come as the biggest surprise to another high-profile American, a Chicago native by the name of Robert Prevost.
Prevost — aka Pope Leo XIV — is perhaps the only American as famous as Trump on account of his being elected as the 267th Bishop of Rome last May.
Speaking at a peace vigil at the Vatican on April 11 — as popes often do — Leo spoke out against Trump’s war, warning in a speech delivered in English that a “delusion of omnipotence” was undermining global stability while calling on world leaders to lean more heavily on diplomacy than on militarism.
He did not even mention Trump’s name, but Trump took it personally enough that he lashed out at Leo the next day.
Writing on Truth Social, he accused the pontiff of taking Iran’s side in the conflict while slamming him as a “very liberal person” who was “catering to the radical left”, “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”
He continued to attack Leo in various settings, both on Truth Social and during availabilities with reporters over the next few days, even going so far as to falsely accuse him of saying it would be acceptable for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. As is typical with Trump’s targets, at least one of his supporters took the attacks as suggestion to call in a bomb threat against the Illinois home of Leo’s brother, John Prevost.
So how does Joe Rogan end up with an invitation to the Oval Office after criticizing Trump’s Iran war while the Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles and Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church gets a series of angry Truth Social posts and repeated attacks over a period of days?
To put it bluntly, Trump thinks he needs Rogan more than he needs Leo with the midterms fast approaching.
According to people familiar with the president’s thinking, he and his aides are quite concerned about the possibility that the young man who followed Rogan’s lead by voting for Trump in droves during the last election will abandon him even more fully than many already have over the Iran war.
By showing a bit of grace towards Rogan, he can keep the king of the podcast bros in his corner while dismissing his criticisms, no matter how pointed, as part of Rogan’s job as an entertainer. Attacking him will just drive his listeners away, either to the couch where they will sit on their hands this November — or worse, to the polls where they will vote for Democrats.
But The Independent also understands that Trump isn’t very concerned about attacks on Leo driving away enough Catholic voters to negatively impact his party.
In 2024, a Pew Research study found that the president carried Catholics by a 12-point advantage over Kamala Harris, a more than 10-point swing from when the Catholic vote split almost evenly during the contest between Trump and Joe Biden four years earlier.
In Trump’s political calculus, that advantage will be more enduring than the boost he got from young men coming out for him, particularly if he alienates podcast bro royalty like Rogan.
He also believes, rightly or wrongly, that Catholics, particularly the devout ones who center opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights in their politics, care more about his efforts to restrict reproductive rights and oust transgender Americans from any measure of public visibility than anything he might say about the Pope.
After all, most churchgoers hear a sermon just once a week. But podcasters like Rogan are in voters ears on a daily basis.
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