Trump through the taping.
Photograph: The Joe Rogan Expertise
Two hours and 40 minutes into Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump, essentially the most influential podcaster in America lastly requested the previous president about at the least certainly one of his most frequent obsessions. “One of many issues I wished to speak to you about was the JFK recordsdata,” Rogan mentioned, earlier than flippantly urgent Trump for a purpose why he didn’t absolutely launch the labeled recordsdata on the assassination that has captivated many Individuals who consider that the authorities performed a job within the homicide of John F. Kennedy. Trump mentioned there are some folks nonetheless alive “who’re affected” — to which Rogan steered that these folks had been “implicated” in a plot to kill Kennedy. “When there reside folks, you typically don’t wish to do it,” Trump mentioned.
It seems Rogan himself took this identical protect-the-living strategy on Friday, to Trump’s profit, relating to one other certainly one of his obsessions: the mysteriously well-connected sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Since Epstein killed himself in 2019 in a Manhattan cell to keep away from prosecution for alleged intercourse trafficking, the highest podcaster has returned to the matter again and again on his present. In a 2020 interview with a former CIA agent, Rogan proposed that Epstein didn’t kill himself and mentioned at size the concept that he was an Israeli intelligence asset tasked with getting leverage over the world’s wealthy and highly effective. In 2022, he instructed COVID skeptic Alex Berenson how conspiracist Alex Jones instructed him years earlier than about “an island the place they take influential folks and so they have intercourse with underage folks.” In 2023, Rogan speculated that Epstein’s portray of Invoice Clinton in a costume in his Higher East Facet mansion was a reminder of his leverage over the previous president. He’s riffed on Epstein conspiracies with comic buddies like Shane Gillis, Tim Dillon, and Whitney Cummings. In August, Rogan was not afraid to ask billionaire and former FBI informant Peter Thiel about his scheduled conferences with Epstein in 2014 — six years after the financier went to jail for intercourse crimes. (Naturally, Thiel disagreed with Rogan’s ideas on Epstein having “filth” on the world’s strongest folks.)
However on Friday, he didn’t ask Trump about Epstein as soon as.
Rogan and Trump in studio on Friday.
Photograph: Screencap/The Joe Rogan Expertise
There was a lot Rogan may have requested about, resembling Trump’s lengthy friendship with Epstein within the Nineties. He didn’t ask about flying on Epstein’s notorious airplane. He didn’t ask in regards to the (unsubstantiated) claims from Epstein’s alleged victims that Trump had intercourse with them. He didn’t ask in regards to the new allegation, this week, from mannequin Stacey Williams, who claimed that Trump groped her in Trump Tower in 1993 as Epstein watched. And he didn’t ask Trump about his remark in 2002 that Epstein “likes stunning ladies as a lot as I do, and lots of of them are on the youthful aspect.” (Trump has denied wrongdoing in all of the above allegations.)
They talked about a lot else although. Trump was longwinded, rambling however lucid, as he mentioned how impressed he was by the Lincoln bed room within the White Home, and the way the phrase “tariff” is “extra stunning than love.” Rogan teed up Trump to bash Harris on her insurance policies within the 2020 Democratic main and so they each mentioned their ideas on wind generators. (Rogan mentioned that they’re “gross” and ugly, whereas Trump referred to as them “chook cemeteries” and steered they may making whales suicidal. “I wanna be a whale psychiatrist,” he added.) Trump claimed that Google CEO Sundar Pichai instructed him that his stunt look working at McDonald’s this week was “one of many largest issues we’ve ever had on Google.”
Perhaps — like Trump instructed Rogan — when there reside folks, you typically don’t wish to ask about it.
