According to Forbes, Donald Trump talked about five important things in a three-hour-plus podcast with Joe Rogan: whether the 2020 election was stolen; whether Kamala Harris was a “low IQ person”; whether he trusts polls; whether there is life on Mars (some “great pilots” have seen “things, sir, that were very strange” and “there’s no reason not to think that Mars and all these planets don’t have life”); and whether he would, if elected, eliminate federal income tax (he might). The New York Times highlighted the same points, adding a meandering discussion about the environment, where Trump suggested that environmental regulations were just a scheme to enrich consultants.
The BBC, meanwhile, took away seven points: most of the above, plus what Trump considers his biggest mistake (hiring the wrong people during his presidency, “neocons or bad people or disloyal people”); his own state of health (“unbelievable” – he meant in a good way); foreign affairs (he said to Kim Jong-un: “Little Rocket Man, you’re going to burn in hell,” but they got on fine after that, because that’s how little rocket men like to be spoken to). The BBC also included a segment on The Apprentice: how NBC tried to talk Trump out of running for president, not because it feared he might be unfit and dangerous, but because it wanted to keep the show on the road.
And those are all reasonable talking points of course: if tax is to be abolished and replaced with tariffs, that sounds like something a citizen ought to know. If the peaceful transfer of democratic power is still hotly contested in Trump’s mind – if he blankly cannot conceive of an election in which he was not victorious, without assuming fraud – then it’s surely worth thinking about what that could look like in a fortnight’s time.
But there are other themes easily as dominant, easily as recurring, that respectable people are too polite to mention, because it’s like listening to a drunk Alan Partridge, his subconscious just gaping open. As Trump imagineers himself into a mixed martial arts changing room with Rogan, you can’t help but travel there with them, however much you’d prefer not to. “You love going in there after the fight and they’re sweating all over you, they’re slopping all over you, they’re bleeding sometimes,” Trump said. His strange, lascivious disgust sometimes sounds as though it’s about to capsize him, but somehow his psyche always comes to the rescue, drags him back to a happy place, with pilots, or film stars, or better still, the film stars of the past.
Here he is, again with Rogan, on Air Force One – “These guys are specimens. I always say they’re better looking than Tom Cruise. OK? And they’re even taller, like perfect specimens … You could see the pilot, a perfect looking human being, his co-pilot. Everybody was perfect. They were all like movie stars.” Back in March, his animating issue was what Cary Grant would have looked like, aged 81, or 100, in a bathing suit (he “wouldn’t look too good, and he was pretty good-looking, right?”). A week ago, playing dress-up in McDonald’s, he got to the point – because really, what are bathing suits, and sweat, and blood, and beauty, except a tease? All you really need to know, particularly about deceased golfers, is what’s underneath. “Arnold Palmer was all man,” Trump told reporters, who definitely hadn’t asked. “When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said: ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’”
In an astonishing attempt at sane-washing, the Wall Street Journal called this a “ribald tribute” – “crude talk that plays to his most ardent backers, particularly men”. Fair play, I don’t spend that much time in the locker room or its online equivalent, the manosphere, but I’m medium-sure their crude talk is actually quite low on other men’s remarkable penises. Or, where they do crop up, there’s some narrative drive, some beginning, middle and end.
It’s like listening to a man who’s been hypnotised. The truly remarkable thing about disinhibition is that it throws all the embarrassment back on to the audience, which shuffles away, averting its gaze, talking about polls, concentrating on tax and North Korea.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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