During the podcast, Trump falsely spoke of “transgender operations, where they’re allowed to take your child when he goes to school and turn him into a female without parental consent.” Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Gage Skidmore

Bad Takes a column of opinion and analysis.

“Everybody knows by now, all businessmen are completely full of shit, just the worst kind of low-life, criminal cocksuckers you could ever want to run into – a fuckin’ piece-of-shit businessman. And the proof of it is, they don’t even trust each other. When a businessman sits down to ‘negotiate a deal’, the first thing he does is to automatically assume that the other guy is a complete, lying prick who’s trying to fuck him out of his money. So he’s got to do everything he can to fuck the other guy a little bit faster and a little bit harder. And he’s gotta do it with a big smile on his face. You know that big, bullshit businessman smile?” — George Carlin, You Are All Diseased, 1999

Presidential candidate Donald Trump flew into Austin on Friday and granted an interview with the most gullible man in show business, Joe Rogan, on his Spotify podcast. The meeting of the minds garnered over 30 million views on YouTube in fewer than 3 days.

“We can’t have corrupt elections, we can’t have open borders,” Trump summed up his pitch to Rogan’s massive audience in the home stretch before Nov. 5.

After three hours of conversation, not one word was said about labor unions, reproductive rights or even the decriminalization of cannabis. And watching an alleged liberty-loving stoner like Rogan parrot the false advertising of the GOP felt as incongruous as a finance bro handing out copies of Das Kapital at the local Whataburger. Trump has called for executing drug dealers, for example, while his rival for the presidency, Kamala Harris, this month reiterated her support for federal marijuana legalization.

Back in July 2022, Rogan told interviewer Lex Fridman, “I’m not a Trump supporter in any way, shape, or form. I’ve had the opportunity to have him on my show more than once, I’ve said no every time. I don’t wanna help him, I’m not interested in helping him.”

“The night is still young. We’ll see,” Fridman retorted.

Surprised, Rogan asked, “You think I’ll have him on?”

“Yeah, I think you’ll have him on,” Fridman accurately predicted.

After all, Fridman argued, Rogan had had on Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, in spite of his antisemitism and Holocaust denial.

“Yeah, but Kanye is an artist,” Rogan replied. “Kanye doing well or not doing well doesn’t change the course of our country.”

“Do you really bear the responsibility of the course of our country based on a conversation?” Fridman inquired.

“I think you can revitalize and rehabilitate someone’s image in a way that is pretty shocking,” Rogan said.

The weight of civic responsibility must have lifted from Rogan’s shoulders in the intervening two years. Although he admitted to Fridman that he lacked the time needed to adequately research Trump’s alleged crimes, he evidently made his peace with helping to rehab the image of Don the Con a mere 11 days before one of the most consequential elections in United States history.

Trump was given carte blanche to shovel a Texas-sized portion of horseshit. The former president spoke of “the transgender operations, where they’re allowed to take your child when he goes to school and turn him into a female without parental consent. Who wants this?”

Well, nobody wants that, old man, which is why it’s fucking insane to claim it’s actually happening. But I guess demagogues found their 2004 gay marriage scaremongering tactic for 2024.

Rogan offered no pushback to Trump’s cartoonish claim.

Trump brought a chart with him of the U.S.’s exponentially increasing healthcare spending versus declining life expectancy compared to other developed nations. This from the president who tried repeatedly and desperately to repeal Obamacare and kick tens of millions of Americans off their coverage, and who neglected to mention that in those other rich democracies, healthcare is treated as a human right.

No pushback from Rogan.

And what really took the Trump steak, needless to say, was his belief-defying refusal to at long last simply admit he lost the 2020 election. But is it too much to ask that the most popular broadcaster in America, who Spotify reportedly paid $200 million, to fact-check the Big Lie that caused a riot at the Capitol and could have resulted in a protracted constitutional crisis or worse?

“Trump’s own attorney general said there were no signs of significant fraud,” the Associated Press pointed out in a post-interview fact check. The AP added: “Trump and his supporters lost more than 50 lawsuits trying to overturn the election.”

Indeed, for 14 of those, “Trump and his allies dropped their lawsuits before they even got to the merits phase,” the Hoover Institution found. “‘In many cases, after making extravagant claims of wrongdoing, Trump’s legal representatives showed up in court or state proceedings empty-handed, and then returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsupported claims’, their report states.”

“The rebels are Republicans now,” Rogan told Trump during the interview. “You want to be a rebel, you want to be punk rock, you want to buck the system, you’re a conservative now.”

But this is just a pacifying and pathetic veneer of pseudo-radicalism. The world’s richest man literally did jumping jacks next to Trump on the rally-stage. How can otherwise decent and honest folks possibly believe in their heart of hearts that this billionaire will drain the swamp and put an end to the monied corruption of our republic?

Trump seemed flabbergasted that Harris and the Democrats are running on raising taxes on wealthy corporations and individuals making more than $400,000 a year.

“They think millionaires and billionaires are not paying their fair shares,” Rogan explained. “It’s a narrative, right, and it’s a narrative that appeals to people that are not doing well.”

But the concentration of wealth is not some delusional “woke” fantasy.

As union lawyer Matt Bruenig mapped out before the pandemic: “Between 1989 and 2018, the top 1% increased its total net worth by $21 trillion. The bottom 50% actually saw its net worth decrease by $900 billion over the same period.”

Trump also conveniently forgot that Harris’ proposal would cut taxes for 99% of taxpayers, according to an Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analysis.

“The problem is the rich people are going to leave, and they’re going to close up their companies, and then the other people aren’t going to have jobs, you
know,” Trump told Rogan, letting his worldview out of the bag. “That’s what happens.”

There it is, in plain English: Cater to the billionaire class I represent or kiss your economy goodbye.

In a study of contrasts, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders was also in Austin this month, interviewed by Rogan’s friend, Lex Fridman.

Sanders called out Trump’s photo-op moonlighting as a McDonald’s employee for 15 minutes, because, when asked by a reporter whether he supported increasing the minimum wage above $7.25 an hour — which is what many fast-food workers receive and which has been stuck at that pittance for going on 15 years now — Trump changed the subject and refused to answer the question.

On Fridman’s podcast, Sanders spoke about the hard job of opposing the military-industrial complex and the oligarchical form of society that Trump seems intent on force-feeding steroids.

Trump versus Sanders is the election the establishment never permitted us to have: two populists with diametrically opposed messages, one culled from the reactionary sentiments of George Wallace and the other aspiring to the dream of Martin Luther King Jr.

“Trump is a smart politician,” Sanders conceded to Fridman, “and he’s appealing to a lot of the anger that working class people feel. And you know what? Working class people should feel angry. But they should make sure that their anger is directed in the right direction, not against people who are even worse off than they are, which is what demagogues like Trump always do.” 

Stoking the division between foreign-born and native-born workers has proven instrumental, historically, as a divide-and-conquer strategy favoring the ruling class, and Rogan’s yarns about undocumented migrants voting in droves makes him their useful idiot of the moment.

But perhaps any attempt to move beyond plutocracy would inevitably result in economic ruin. Perhaps the climate is screwed anyway and we may as well fill up our tanks with cheap gas. Perhaps the most pressing issue this campaign season is whether trans kids can play on the school soccer team as themselves. Perhaps theocrats like U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and neofascists like Trump are the public servants we deserve — the best we can do.

If you disagree, Election Day is next Tuesday.

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This article appears in Oct 16-29, 2024.