In one of his longest interviews yet as a candidate, former President Donald Trump sat down for a three-hour chat with podcaster Joe Rogan, and it was a wild ride! If you thought his rally speeches were meandering and sometimes fact-adjacent, this convo was a whole new level of chaotic.
While rally-goers in Traverse City, Michigan, waited an extra three hours for Trump to wrap up his time with Rogan, he took shots at Vice President Harris, claiming she “couldn’t put two sentences together” and bragged about his own knack for jumping from topic to topic like it was an Olympic sport. “I like to give a long — the weave,” Trump said on The Joe Rogan Experience. “But when you do the weaves… it comes back home for the right people.” Rogan jumped in with, “Gotta get it back home,” and Trump continued, “For the wrong people, it doesn’t come back home and they end up in the wilderness, right?”
True to form, Trump’s talk with Rogan was a grab bag of disconnected topics, ranging from UFOs to dead whales, with a random detour about Abraham Lincoln thrown in for good measure. “Lincoln had a… I don’t know. I’ve never read this, I heard it from people in the White House who really understand what was going on,” he mused, going on about Lincoln’s supposed phobia of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
You know Trump couldn’t resist circling back to his presidential campaign staples, like his calls to lower the corporate tax rate and slap hefty tariffs on foreign cars. And of course, he doubled down on his favorite lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. “I won by like — I lost by like — I didn’t lose, but they say I lost, Joe,” he claimed, despite the obvious facts.
In a surprising pivot, Trump hinted at wanting to eliminate income taxes altogether, suggesting the government could rely solely on tariffs to fund itself. But before he could dive deeper, he quickly switched gears to billionaire Elon Musk and joked about Rogan being more of a “Khabib person” than a Harris supporter, referencing UFC fighter Khabib Nurmagomedov. “Your weave is getting wide,” Rogan quipped, and honestly, it was hard to argue with him.
As Trump gears up for his third presidential run, he’s been increasingly erratic in his public appearances. During the Rogan podcast, he made a bold claim about an “enemy from within” being a bigger threat than countries like North Korea. “We have a bigger problem, in my opinion, with the enemy from within… people that I really think want to make this country unsuccessful,” he asserted.
When he finally made it to Michigan, Trump appeared visibly worn out, echoing some of his earlier talking points from the Rogan interview but with noticeably less energy. The crowd was left waiting as he entered to the ominous theme music of WWE wrestler The Undertaker, standing silently on stage for dramatic effect.
“I figured you wouldn’t mind too much, because we’re trying to win,” he said, before launching into his usual rhetoric about poll numbers and early voting turnout, claiming to lead in all seven swing states despite tight races indicated by actual polling. He even took a jab at Harris for holding a rally in Texas with none other than Beyoncé. “You know where she is tonight? She’s out partying,” Trump said, shaking his head. “So Israel is attacking, we got a war going on, and she’s out partying. At least we’re working to make America great again, that’s what we’re doing.”
With Trump, you never know what you’re going to get, but one thing’s for sure: this interview was anything but dull!