Joe Rogan GOES NUCLEAR on Trump, DROPS F-BOMBS

Here at Pondering Politics, we continue to track the political trajectory of MAGA or MAGA-adjacent influencers and podcasters who helped sanitize Donald Trump during the 2024 election cycle. Many of them, like Andrew Schultz of The Flagrant Podcast, Dave Smith, Theo Vaughn, Tim Dillon especially, have explicitly turned against Trump. But the biggest one of all is Joe Rogan, and his trajectory has been a bit more complicated. Sometimes it seems one step forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back, one step forward, two steps back. Joe Rogan, unfortunately, has been the most recalcitrant to totally break from Trump, even though he's become increasingly critical over the past year and a half. Well, on the latest episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan did go a bit nuclear on many of Trump's recent decisions and campaign promise violations from the Epstein files, to the JFK files, to the 9-11 files, to the war in Iran, and we have to talk about it. But before we do, if you end up liking this video and you want to support the channel, please be sure to hit the like, subscribe, and alert bells before you go. All right, folks, as Mediaite reports, Joe Rogan and his guests ripped through a list of grievances with Donald Trump and argued that his second term has been nothing, that everything his supporters hope for. Author and bowhunter Cameron Haynes joined Rogan this week on The Joe Rogan Experience, where Haynes declared, quote, he has no idea what this current Trump term even is. Haynes and Rogan were discussing how the negativity of politics and state of the world can drag one's mental health down, and Rogan brought up several issues that people have concern over. And so with that in mind, let's hear some of this from the big cheese himself, Joe Rogan. It's like you just get fed up. You're like, where the **** are these Epstein files? Yeah. Who the **** is this? Why is this redacted? Where is it? Who the **** killed JFK? Right. Like, come out with it. Who the ****? Who ******* killed Charlie Kirk for real? Yeah. Like, what is that? Why is that ******* story so clouded in mystery? And why did they pave over the ******* ground right after the shooting? What the **** is going on there? See, now you're making me in a bad mood. It's easy to do, but no, I have to remind myself like, cause I, if you start mentioning those things that you just did, oh, it's hard, dude, I will ******* lose my ---- because I'm so pissed. I know it should be. And we were all, we're all pissed. We were all, you know, we all thought that, you know, all that stuff was going to be released right after the election. It's going to, we're going to drain the swamp and find all the pedophiles. And the first term was more like that. That's what gave me hope for this term. The first term, there was some draining the swamp going on, I felt. Then we had the Biden disaster. And now the second term has been, I don't even know what this is. I don't even know where it is. Well, it would have been a whole lot different for, first of all, if we didn't bomb Iran. I feel like we bombed them the first time we were good. The second time was like, even the first time I was like, what the **** are we doing? Yeah. So let's stop right there. A couple of things. There was no draining of the swamp during the first Trump term. This is bullshit. It's a lie that MAGA tell themselves. No evidence of that whatsoever. Donald Trump is the ultimate manifestation of the swamp. There has been no politician as corrupt as Donald Trump. Political corruption predates Trump. Political corruption is something that exists in both parties to one extent or another. And I have problem with MAGA Republicans complaining about the corruption in the Democratic Party. But if they ignore the corruption in the Republican Party and from Trump, as they often do, that's a problem. It means you're an unprincipled, hypocritical loser and a liar. And it means you actually don't give a damn about corruption. You cheerlead corruption as long as it's your guy, and you'll celebrate corruption as long as it owns the libs, which is preposterous. Donald Trump is objectively the most corrupt politician in American history. He was violating the Emoluments Clause, engaging in corrupt conflicts of interest during his first term. He failed to divest himself of his businesses in his first term. He appointed his daughter, Ivanka, his son-in-law, Jared, neither of whom had any relevant expertise to positions of government power. Imagine if Joe Biden had done that with Hunter Biden. A pissed off you, Cameron Haynes, and you, Joe Rogan, would be. But Biden, who had his faults but was infinitely ethically superior to Donald Trump, and that's not a matter of opinion. It's a matter of fact. Anyone who says otherwise is an idiot or a moron, or just a liar, I suppose. Joe Biden didn't do that. Barack Obama didn't do that. As a matter of fact, the intelligence community believed that Jared Kushner was a liability given his outstanding debt, that in other words, foreign adversaries could see him as a national security breach because he had so much debt. Trump overrode them and gave them high positions of power anyway. And then after Jared left the Trump administration, after effectively serving as shadow secretary of state, he went on to receive billions of dollars from the Saudi government, even though he had no relevant experience to justify such an investment, unless, of course, he was engaging in corrupt quid pro quos and basically scratching the Saudis back on behalf of the Trump administration. Then that would make sense, right? So no, there was no draining of the swamp in the first Trump term. But yes, the second Trump term is infinitely worse. We're seeing Trump hand off $24 million contracts to taxpayer-funded Defense Department contracts to companies that are controlled by his children, hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts in a separate DOD contract. He is basically taking taxpayer dollars and giving them to his family. Joe Biden never did that. Barack Obama never did that. And if they did, these two, Joe Rogan and Cameron Haynes, would be pissed. So that's just one example. The $1.8 billion slush fund, the fact that he's making billions of dollars off cryptocurrency, even though that's an industry he regulates. Trump is just, again, orders of magnitude more corrupt than any Democratic politician. Cameron Haynes didn't give a ----. But he does recognize that this has been apparently just—he doesn't even have the describe how disastrous the Trump administration has been. As far as the Epstein files go, it's obviously been a debacle. Everyone said that there was a grand conspiracy here, and it turned out to be the case, just not the one they imagined. They imagined that there would be a Democratic-led conspiracy theory and that exposing the Epstein files would, in fact, expose all these liberal elites drinking the blood of children, getting the adrenochrome and stuff like that. And actually, what the actual conspiracy is, is that Donald Trump is listed in the Epstein files, certainly more than any individual Democrat. He was close friends with Jeffrey Epstein for years. And it was Donald Trump and the Trump administration, not the Democrats, not the Biden administration, not the Obama administration, that has actively worked to suppress the Epstein files. So it's all Donald Trump's fault. He is 100 percent to blame. And the Democrats are perfect in this respect because it was the Democrats who led the initiative, along with a few Republicans, like Thomas Massey, to get the Epstein files disclosed. So yes, it's been one massive betrayal after another to say nothing of the Iran war. But let's hear a bit more. What's going on is that Donald Trump violated his campaign pledge and he should get no credit. He should get all the blame. You should be reading him the riot act the way you would, again, if it were a Democrat. That's the problem here. Joe Rogan is doing everything in his power to try to give Trump a lifeline, right? He's become increasingly critical of Trump over the corruption, over the campaign file or the campaign promises, the Epstein files, the Iran war, the ICE malfeasance, which resulted in the murder of two American citizens. Rogan has called all that out. And that's good, given how important Joe Rogan's voice is. But he still, like so many others, braids Trump on a curve. He feels the need. I got to throw him a lifeline the way I never would for a Democrat, the way I never would for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Barack Obama. That's the problem. They have staked so much on their proximity to Trump that as Trump continues to do what he does and prove that he's objectively worse than any Democrat, it puts Rogan in an uncomfortable position, not unlike Megyn Kelly. Megyn Kelly is the more MAGA version of Joe Rogan here. So I appreciate Rogan calling this out. I appreciate Rogan's pro-MAGA guest calling this out as well. And we will continue to track this trajectory because, again, given his influence, he's one of the most popular podcasters in the world. Although my distouch, you know, at various points has actually done better than Joe Rogan on some of the various charts. I don't know if it was the Spotify or YouTube podcast or both. But Joe Rogan most days is, you know, probably the biggest podcaster in the world. And so what he says and does matters because I'm convinced that if it didn't, if it wasn't outcome determinative, the role of these MAGA or MAGA adjacent podcasters interviewing Trump, sanitizing and laundering Trump along the way, the Tim Dillons, the Andrew Schultz's, the Theo Bonds, the Dave Smith's, the Joe Rogan's. I'm convinced that that helped Trump back, that that helped propel him back into the White House. And so if these people desert him and even better, if they become outspoken critics of him, it will weaken the MAGA coalition. And the truth of the matter is just on the substance alone, it's more than justified. Trump is, again, objectively incompetent, objectively corrupt, objectively authoritarian. It's been a total ---- show from start to finish, which is why a year and a half into a second term, he's more unpopular than Joe Biden ever was. That's how bad he's doing. In the meantime, let me know what you think in the comments.