Donald Trump, Joe Rogan, and the s**t-post spiral of the US election

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Earlier this summer, I went on a BBC radio panel to talk about political podcasts and the impact they might (or might not) be having on the General Election. My advice was simple, and something I’ve repeated countless times. If I were managing the media for a political party during an election campaign, I would avoid podcasts like the plague. 10-minute primetime radio or TV slots? Sure. Hour long conversations with highly partisan interviewers, usually edited post-recording in a way that’s out of my control? Nah.

Donald Trump didn’t ask me to be the digital media co-ordinator for his election campaign — which is good for both of us. There’s not one thing that Mr Trump has done in the last several weeks that I would’ve encouraged, not to mention the fact that I’d rather chug a carton of spoiled milk than work with him. But still… The Donald’s campaign is raising some interesting questions about the new formation of the media during election season. Last year, Scott Galloway, on his show Pivot from New York Magazine, said that 2024 might just be “the podcast election”. And even though I find his premise deeply flawed, the Republican candidate (and his team) are doing their best to prove Prof G right.

This American election cycle has highlighted some stark differences in the approach that political campaigns take to media engagement. Vice-President Harris has preferred short, set piece events with cameras present but limited scope for exogenous issues (difficult questions, say, or hecklers/shooters from the gallery). On the rare occasions when the Democrats have tried to be a bit more experimental, they’ve usually deputised Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, whose words are looser but the consequences much smaller. All the same, Walz has played it pretty safe. Calling JD Vance “weird” and correctly reloading a gun are about as far from the core message that Walz has strayed.

The question is one of message, ultimately. At the 2024 UK General Election, Keir Starmer, the leader of the centre-left Labour party, had the easiest of messages. “We are not the Tories,” he kept saying, again and again. He mostly said it by saying, well, nothing — because everyone already knows that Labour are not the Tories. The electorate’s desire to punish the Tories — after 14 years in power — was so strong that it didn’t matter that Labour failed to present much of a progressive message (a fact that is coming home to roost, somewhat, now they’re in government). “Not the Tories,” was an election winning message. And so freewheeling on digital media formats would’ve been a grave error, because in an hour-long podcast interview the questions are going to go beyond “how bad is the current government?”. You’re going to get asked things like “how would you stimulate growth whilst also making up the shortfall in public sector spending?”. These are questions that you want to push into the multi-year hinterland between elections, when the electorate have no recourse to punish your failure to adequately answer.

The contrast between the UK election in 2024 and the election in 2019 was stark: Keir Starmer received 9,708,716 in 2024 and won a 174-seat majority. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader in 2019, won 10,269,051 votes and gifted the Conservatives an 80 seat majority.

Now, there were lots of factors at play in that election and I don’t want to get into a discussion of the UK’s tediously insane electoral system. But in Labour terms, Corbyn was almost the anti-Starmer. He had a very clear political ideology and a clear message. His policy platform was transparent and, to a lot of people, scary. He made a positive case for socialism, repeatedly asserting the good that a Labour government might do for the public sector, and, by extension, the British people. Instead of saying “we’re not the Tories”, he said “we are the left-wing Labour party and here are the reasons why you should vote for us…”.

Boris Johnson, the Conservative leader at the time, had a simpler proposition. He had replaced Theresa May over her failure to get a Brexit deal passed in Parliament. This immediately negated the “not the Tories” line, because Johnson could also claim to be “not those Tories”. Indeed, that was basically the message of the Tory campaign in 2019. “Not those Tories,” Johnson would say, appealing to those who felt that moderates in the party were blockers of the Brexit deal. And, “not the Labour party,” he could also say, appealing to voters who feared that Corbyn was an anti-British, communist, tax-raising demagogue. Two negatives, on this occasion, didn’t cancel each other out: they created one of the most fragile voter coalitions in British political history.

Why am I rambling on about British politics of the last half-decade when we’re only a week out from one of the most consequential elections of my political lifetime? Well, as VP Harris has been trying to play the “not Trump” card, and avoid the sort of over-exposure that cost Joe Biden the chance to become the Oldest Man Ever, President Trump has been doing the opposite. This week he appeared on a 3-hour (well, 2:58:50, technically) podcast with the controversial comedian-turned-shock jock, Joe Rogan.

Now, I’m not a Rogan-hater. I am –full disclosure — a long-time Labour party member, and general tofu-eating metropolitan liberal, so I accept that he’s not for me. But he has a libertarian streak that I don’t find offensive. All the same, if there’s one word that I’d use to describe Rogan, it’s ‘credulous’. Too often he invites his guests to give their opinion and fails to robustly challenge or problematise those opinions, which should be the first responsibility of a competent journalist. He is a serial ‘platformer’, offering a soapbox to many people I agree with and many people I disagree with. Which is fine: but the truth is that if you book a 3-hour interview with a Presidential candidate and fail to discomfit them at all, you’ve failed at your job.

But it doesn’t really matter if Rogan fails or succeeds in challenging the candidate (he claims he has reached out to Team Harris, who naturally have not taken up his offer). The decision to book Trump on The Joe Rogan Experience just 10 days out from polling day is a demonstration of something that a lot of us instinctively know to be true: it no longer matters what Donald Trump says or does.

Tony Blair, in his 1997 pomp, could not have got through a 3-hour, live interview without stumbling into faux pas or error. 178 minutes (that’s what Rogan had) to try and catch Trump not being across his brief, staggering into conjecture or mistakes, rowing back on statements he’d previously made. Trump has provided the world (and the JRE research team) with one of the biggest corpuses of written and spoken material in human history: the idea that he won’t deviate into hypocrisy or fallacy is for the birds. No human — however mentally competent and nimble — could do that. And so Trump x Rogan is a demonstration of the fact that we are now in the shit-post spiral of this election, where careless words don’t become policy — they become content.

Take, for example, the latest brouhaha with some random comedian (I think he’s actually one of these podcast bros who has self-identified as a ‘comedian’, despite being as funny as the spoiled milk I won’t chug) calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at a MAGA rally. This is exactly the sort of incident that the Harris campaign avoids by — you know — not booking freelance stand-ups at rallies, and then not vetting their material. The reaction has been a bunch of celebs of Puerto Rican extraction — from Bad Bunny to Jennifer Lopez — condemning Trump or doubling down for Harris, much in the same way that the Haitian diaspora fought back against the idiotic “dog eating” slanders of the summer. But Hispanic voters already leaned fractionally in favour of Harris, with Puerto Ricans the group least in favour of a second Trump term. Conservatives in the community — for whom issues like abortion and immigration are always going to be bigger votemovers than the stray barbs of an unknown comic — aren’t going to be swayed. And so we get this clip, that goes round and round and round the digital ecosphere, reminding everyone that the Trump campaign is out there. A movement. A forum for ideas. A pulpit for the anti-woke.

And this framing is because 80% of Americans don’t really care who becomes President. Their lives might be affected by things like inflation — when a bag of corn doubles in price — or interest rates on their mortgages. But, you know, the Harris campaign isn’t coming out and promising to double the price of Mountain Dew and the Trump campaign isn’t promising to halve it. Both campaigns are operating within the margin of error for most potential voters, where the result, come February, is unlikely to have a material impact on their lives. (Please note I’ve left 20% of Americans — i.e. 67,000,000 people — for whom the result will have a material impact). Because these voters (correctly or otherwise) believe that the result of the election is not going to impact their lives, they are susceptible to narrative. And the Trump campaign believes that it can create a better narrative than the Harris campaign.

Now, there are plenty of sensible reasons to vote Republican. Self-interest is a perfectly understandable political driver, even if not a particularly admirable one. If you’re some rich fat cat who smells a tax break, sure, you vote Trump. If you hate Net Zero or DEI initiatives or, for some reason, want to keep trans people out of school sports events — sure, vote Trump. For the majority of people, who are either not affected by or not invested in these issues, the choice becomes one of signification. What does a vote for Harris signify? What does a vote for Trump say about you? And the Trump campaign is trying to wheel the great MAGA ship away from its origins amongst disenfranchised blue collar whites, and towards a more generalised demographic. In part, this is because some of the Trump core were lost during his first term, when he failed to drain the swamp and became increasingly hawkish in the Middle East and on China. But mainly it’s because Team Trump know they have to normalise each vote. It took 62,984,828 votes to elect Trump in 2016; it will take considerably more this time round.

And so Trump’s charm offensive has seen him embrace the limitless vacuum of digital and social media, from which Democrat politicians have largely recused themselves. He has cavorted with YouTubers like Adin Ross and Logan Paul. He has booked out Madison Square Garden for his rallies, and licked the boots of men like Elon Musk who can signal boost this message. He has even allowed himself to be filmed serving at a McDonalds — breaking the Ed Miliband’s Golden Rule of Politics. His attitude has screamed “I don’t give a shit” and has appealed, successfully, to those who don’t really give a shit who wins this election. If nothing is really at stake for you, then of course it’s funnier to vote Trump than Harris. I’m not a total killjoy; I understand how politics works for the apolitical.

The question is whether, as well as creating this narrative that it’s ok to vote Trump, the former President’s campaign is also galvanising Harris’s simple “I am not Donald Trump message”. Every time Donald Trump appears on TikTok or YouTube, X or Facebook, Bluesky or Insagram, he is both reminding his supporters to vote for him, and Harris’s to vote against him. And for all that Team Trump claim that lefties call him a “fascist” and chant “lock him up”, they are the ones who are on the perpetual attack. A charm offensive, sure, but also an offensive offensive. Any slip from the Harris campaign will be grist to the mill of the Trump machine. Meanwhile, any slip from Trump is just another Trumpism. Boys will be boys, Trump will be Trump, and both sides will play with what this asymmetry has afforded them.

Which brings me back to my original contention, that I would not want a political candidate to draw attention to their personality or policy platform during the campaign proper. For all that the media narrative has shifted towards assuming a second Trump victory, the polls are still very tight. I am not an American, let alone a polling analyst, and I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess at what the outcome will be next week. All the same, I suspect the caucus of voters that Trump has been seducing will be less reliable than the ones that Harris has targeted. Next Tuesday, when the queues start mounting and the prospect of voting goes from an ‘intention’ to a ‘chore’, which group will be more motivated? The people who are voting because they like the iconography of a Trump vote, or the group that are voting because they hate the idea of a Trump presidency? I suspect the latter are more reliable from a turnout perspective.

In 2016, 54.8% of the voting age population turned out, and Donald Trump beat Hilary Clinton. In 2020, 62.8% of the VAP turned out, and Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. That 8% jump was the biggest election-on-election movement in recorded history, and it’s hard not to see it as a direct response to the apathy that created the first Trump presidency. But after four years of the Democrats in power, and few solutions to America’s (or the world’s) problems, will voters be more or less keen to get out and vote? Will the Trump campaign’s dominance of the election narrative translate into boots on the ground? Or will the status quoist forces that reasserted themselves in 2020 be witnessed, in full glory, once again?

One things’s for sure: the safe money, in this election, is on not betting at all.

Follow me on Bluesky, I guess. Or TikTok. Or email me your thoughts, to nick@podotpods.com if you fancy.