Could Trump’s chat with Rogan swing the election?

It’s safe to say that Donald Trump’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience last week has set the internet on fire. Hot off the success of Trump’s McDonald’s stunt earlier this month, the former president’s appearance on the world’s No1 podcast looks to have been another publicity masterstroke. As of right now, the episode has over 33million views on YouTube. Which is impressive, given that it’s almost three hours long.

It produced a series of eminently memeable moments. Trump talked about how he would have stopped Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (‘I told him, I said, “Vladimir, you’re not going in”’). He offered an anecdote from his infamous meeting with Kim Jong-un (apparently, he told the North Korean dictator to ‘just relax’ and ‘go to the beach’ rather than develop nuclear missiles). Trump even revealed, at one point, that he wants to be a ‘whale psychologist’.

More seriously, they also discussed Trump’s wild, anti-democratic claims that the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ from him (Rogan wasn’t convinced); his desire to scrap income taxes; and what he thought were some of his biggest mistakes in office.

Trump came off as alternately hilarious and surprisingly earnest over the marathon encounter. Still, he reserved some venom for presidential rival Kamala Harris, dismissing her as a ‘very low-IQ person’, noting her hysterical comparisons between himself and Adolf Hitler. ‘Can you imagine Kamala doing this show?’, Trump asked Rogan at one point. ‘I hope she does, because it would be a mess. She would be lying on the floor comatose.’

To be fair, he has a point. The idea that Harris could speak for three hours, completely unscripted, seems pretty far-fetched, going by her recent trainwreck TV interviews. While she did appear on the Call Her Daddy podcast recently, it was less than an hour long and clearly far more heavily produced.

Reportedly, Rogan has extended an invitation to the Harris campaign, but it has decided not to take him up on it. It’s not hard to guess why.

Trump is hardly a details man, and his meandering brags (which he has dubbed ‘the weave’) are often perplexing, to say the least. But you get the impression that three hours of Kamala ‘unfiltered’ would boil down to a whole lot of nothing.

Incidentally, a clip of Harris’s Call Her Daddy appearance has racked up just under 700,000 views on YouTube, to Trump’s 33million for his chat with Rogan.

Will this clinch the election for Trump, as some have suggested? No single interview or media appearance ever could, of course.

Following Trump’s appearance on comedian Theo Von’s podcast earlier this year, as well as his cosying up to Elon Musk, you could say the Trump campaign is becoming a bit too online. Indeed, Trump’s lengthy Rogan appearance meant he left his supporters waiting in Michigan for hours on end. Just as the Democrats have often mistaken Twitter for the nation, and continue to spend more time courting celebrities than winning over ordinary voters, the same could also turn out to be true of the Republicans this time around – confusing buzz on X for genuine momentum.

Still, whatever else you might say about him, Donald Trump – with his comedic timing and willingness to veer off-script – remains the candidate people can’t stop watching, even for three hours. Can the same really be said for Kamala?

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.