One weirdness of listening to Donald Trump talk for any length of time is that, amid the syllable minestrone, he occasionally says something that is both intelligible and honest.
One such moment came during his appearance on the popular podcast hosted by the computer scientist Lex Fridman this week. “To get the word out,” Trump said, is important in politics, and television was becoming “a little bit older and maybe less significant.” The online sphere—podcasts and forums such as Spaces, on X—has usurped its importance. “I just see that these platforms are starting to dominate; they’re getting very big numbers,” Trump added.
Now, that isn’t quite true. Prime-time television still commands mass audiences, and Trump’s X chat with Elon Musk in August was plagued by the kinds of technical glitches and audio-quality issues that would get someone fired at a traditional media company. Nonetheless, in the past few months, Trump has become a fully fledged podcast bro, talking with the livestreamer Adin Ross about the prosecution of the rapper Young Thug, shooting the breeze with the YouTuber turned wrestler Logan Paul about German shepherds, and interrogating the former stand-up comedian Theo Von about cocaine. His running mate, J. D. Vance, meanwhile, sat down with the Nelk Boys, where he manspread luxuriantly between cases of their hard seltzer, Happy Dad. (Product placement is a big feature of interviews on popular bro influencers’ shows: A proprietary energy drink or iced tea, or a copy of their book, is usually floating around in the back of the shot.)
In this presidential election, both candidates are mostly avoiding set-piece interviews with traditional outlets—but only one can rely on a ready-made alternative media ecosystem. Kamala Harris finally did her first full-length sit-down last week, bringing Tim Walz along as a wingman. Instead of submitting Harris to adversarial accountability interviews, her team is wildly outspending the Trump campaign on digital ads, taking the Democrats’ message directly to voters. The Republicans have a cheaper, punkier strategy: hang out with all the boys.
“The funniest component of the Trump campaign’s media strategy so far is its commitment to dipshit outreach,” the Substacker Max Read wrote last month. The constellation of influencers with whom Trump has become enmeshed does not yet have a widely accepted name. “Manosphere” comes close, because it links together the graduates of YouTube prank channels, the Ultimate Fighting Championship boss Dana White’s sprawling empire, shitposters on Elon Musk’s X, and the male-dominated stand-up comedy scene. This is a subset of the podcast world with its own distinct political tang; it is suffused with the idea that society has become too feminized and cautious, and the antidote is spaces dedicated to energy drinks, combat sports, and saying stupid things about Hitler. Think of this as Trump’s red-pill podcast tour.
These podcasts are often self-consciously anti-intellectual, marketing themselves as the home of deliberately dumb acts, edgy jokes, and rambling conversations about UFOs and sports statistics. Their spiritual daddy is Joe Rogan, but whereas he presents himself as a disaffected liberal, the new generation is happy to back right-wing causes and candidates: The Nelk Boys danced the YMCA with Trump at a rally in 2020, and Ross has explicitly endorsed Trump for president.
Fridman, who started out as an artificial-intelligence researcher, is not part of the dipshit circuit. He is a smart guy who covered some genuinely uncomfortable topics for Trump, such as the former president’s association with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his repeated suggestions that the 2020 election was stolen. But the arc of podcasting is long, and it bends toward interviewing tech CEOs about their morning routine. Fridman is now known for dressing like the protagonist of the video game Hitman, being a black belt in jiu-jitsu, and responding to any criticism of his softball style by insisting that he is all about “love.” He really seems to think that if he could get Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky on his podcast, he could sort out this whole unfortunate Ukraine-war business.
Like many in the new podcasting elite, Fridman does not maintain even a thin veneer of journalistic detachment from his subjects. He is a personal friend of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, and boasted on LinkedIn last year that he had spent Thanksgiving at their house, watching The Godfather. In doing so, he wasn’t breaking any kind of norm. By podcasting standards, his refusal to join in with Trump’s thumbs-up in the preinterview photo counts as Cronkite-like rectitude. Before their interview with Trump, Logan Paul and his co-host, Mike Majlak, cheerfully accepted merchandise from him carrying reproductions of the former president’s booking shot in Fulton County, Georgia; Ross gave Trump a Rolex and a customized Tesla Cybertruck with a photo of Trump’s attempted assassination on it. (If Trump keeps these gifts, it will be a violation of campaign-finance rules.)
The art of the deal here is obvious. While the podcasters get views, status, and revenue, Trump gets access to their audience, which is dominated by young men. The gender gap in American voting has widened this electoral cycle, possibly boosted by the Dobbs decision and women’s enthusiasm for a female Democratic candidate. Trump has so far been unable to find an abortion stance that is sufficiently vague to please both female swing voters and his evangelical base. Instead, he appears to be trying to offset his trouble with women by attempting to increase turnout among young men who might be receptive to his message. Trump’s 18-year-old son, Barron, came up in conversation with Ross, Paul, and Von—which isn’t surprising, because Barron is best friends with the teenage conservative influencer Bo Loudon. (One of Loudon’s recent Instagram posts led with the greeting “Greetings Nerds and Virgins.”)
When these conversations touch on politics, it is usually only to allow Trump to recite his stump-speech talking points—illegals are pouring into our country, Kamala Harris is a communist, the economy did better under me. Foreign policy never requires any hard choices, because the war in Gaza would never have happened under Trump, and he would immediately be able to broker a deal between Russia and Ukraine. What would that deal be? Ah, that would be giving away too many details. “I wouldn’t talk about it too much, because I think I can make a deal if I win. As president-elect, I’ll have a deal made, guaranteed,” he told Fridman.
Trump’s podcast interviewers are unequipped or unwilling to deal with this vagueness, because they’ve built their audience by becoming part of a cozy, circular scene. Never mind six degrees of separation; the people in this world rarely have two. In the manosphere podcast circuit, open conflict is frowned upon—perhaps surprisingly, given all the combat-sport veterans involved.
The moment when Fridman appeared most animated, for example, was when he asked the presidential candidate why he had been so mean about Joe Rogan. Fridman and Rogan both live in Austin and have appeared on each other’s podcasts multiple times. During his last appearance, Fridman got out his guitar and sang Rogan a song he had written about him. (Mysteriously, the feed did not show Rogan’s face as he was serenaded about his “shoulders for days and a really wide back.”) That backstory perhaps explains why Fridman seemed more engaged by Trump’s spat with his friend than, say, the Arlington National Cemetery incident, about which he let his guest ramble inaccurately for several minutes without challenge.
Chain-smoke these podcast appearances and something else becomes apparent: These guys simply cannot interrupt. Their disability must be a product of the strange etiquette norms of the podcast circuit, combined with the fact that these encounters are free from the constraints of television broadcast schedules. If you accept the premise that podcasts have replaced traditional presidential press conferences and interviews, that is a problem. Go back to, say, the highly praised Trump interview on HBO in the fall of 2020, and see how Axios’s Jonathan Swan demands specific points from his guest about coronavirus testing:
Swan: When can you commit, by what date, that every American will have access to the same-day testing that you get here in the White House?
Trump: Well, we have great testing. We’re doing and many other people do—
Swan: By what date?
Trump: Let me explain the testing … And there are those that say you can test too much. You do know that.
Swan: Who says that?
Trump: Oh, just read the manuals, read the books.
Swan: Manuals?
Trump: Read the books. Read the books.
Now let’s see Logan Paul and Mike Majlak asking Trump about Gaza:
Majlak: Has your sentiment on [Benjamin] Netanyahu or his regime changed at all in light of any of the events of the past six months?
Trump: No, look, they … It was a shame that—it should have never happened; it would have never happened. Iran was broke when I was president; nobody was allowed to buy oil; nobody was allowed to buy anything; they were broke. A Democrat congressman on Deface the Nation, the show Deface the Nation—ladies and gentlemen, it’s Deface the Nation; yes, commonly known as Face the Nation, but I don’t call it that. I have a name for everything. I’ll end up with a name for you two guys by the time, but it’ll be—
Paul: I can’t wait to hear—
Trump: No, no, they’ll be good names, they’ll be good names. But, so he was on the show and he said whether you like Trump or not, Iran was broke during Trump’s [term]; they would have made a deal within one week and now they have $250 billion. We would have had a deal done in one, literally in one week after the election, and it was ready; they were absolutely [broke]. And they had no money for Hamas; they had no money for Hezbollah. They were broke, stone-cold broke.
The monologue continued for another 90 seconds, taking in the hostage deal for the basketball star Brittney Griner, who “wouldn’t stand up during the national anthem,” before cutting to Paul announcing that this episode was sponsored by his energy drink, Prime X, and its “million-dollar treasure hunt.”
To consume these podcasts back-to-back is to have the sensation of your cerebrum gently oozing out of your ears. The most listenable bits—sadly for American democracy—are when they meander onto UFOs or drug-sniffing dogs or whether Trump has been in a fistfight. (His joking answer: “I’d love to say that I fought my way through the Wharton School of Finance.”) “He is himself manifestly the same kind of dramatic, gossipy, maldeveloped, attention-seeking nuisance as the creators who populate the greater dipshit media economy,” Read declared on Substack.
None of this seems as odd as it would have way back in the mists of, oh, 2012. But maybe treating Trump’s red-pill podcast tour as a strategic decision is a mistake; maybe he just likes to talk. He rambles more than he did when he first ran for president. And this is his comfort zone—holding forth to easily impressed men on topics about which he knows nothing. (In retrospect, Republicans were extremely audacious to spend all spring arguing that Joe Biden was senile when their own candidate is offering minute-long encomiums to German shepherds.) Trump has perfected a style of talking that covers up his frequent inability to retrieve proper nouns from his memory; his long, looping sentences somehow convey their meaning without it ever being stated. This is verbal elevator music. But it probably doesn’t matter: Rambling, fanciful, fact-free—the podcast style has eaten American politics.