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Podcaster Joe Rogan, known for hosting a wide range of guests including those on the right wing, heaped unexpected praise on the Kamala Harris campaign and the vice president’s performance in last week’s debate against Donald Trump.
“Whoever’s helping her, whoever’s coaching her, whoever’s the puppet master running the strings—you did a f***ing amazing job,” Rogan said on an episode released Monday, recorded just after the debate. “They did an amazing job, from the moment Biden drops out, forcing Biden to drop out. Whatever they’re doing, whoever‘s writing those speeches, getting her to deliver them, coaching her, she’s nailing it.”
During the September 11 episode, recorded with comic Tom Segura, Rogan compared Harris’s debate performance to a skilled martial artist trapping their opponent and suggested Trump was poorly prepared, mocking the former president’s rants about crowd size and racist conspiracy theories about Haitians in Ohio.
“He’s not working with a team,” Rogan said. “I know he’s doing mock debates. He did one with Tulsi Gabbard. Someone needs to tell him, you’ve got these tiny little windows, and you should have all the words ready for those windows. There should be no repeating things.”
The podcaster, who has an audience of at least 14 million people, went on to suggest Trump was “funny like a comic,” but said that’s not a quality all voters want in a president.
“We don’t necessarily want that as the guy with his finger on the button, that’s all it is,” Rogan said. “That’s the thing that freaks people out.”
The Independent has contacted the Trump campaign for comment.
Regarding the 2024 election, Rogan has praised Robert F Kennedy, Jr, though he said it wasn’t a formal endorsement.
“It will be interesting to see how loudly Joe Rogan gets BOOED the next time he enters the UFC Ring???” Trump wrote on Truth Social in August after the comments from Rogan, who sometimes serves as a commentator at UFC bouts.
During the 2020 election Rogan suggested he would “probably vote for Bernie,” then expressed his preference for Trump over Biden a few months later.
Snap polls suggested voters considered Harris the winner of the debate, a lead she retains by nearly three points in national poll averages analyzed by The Independent.
The former president reportedly did more to prep for the Harris debate than his faceoff against Biden earlier in the campaign, leaving insiders “stunned” when he ultimately had a bad night.
Trump, for his part, has claimed the debate was “rigged” but that he won it anyway.
“I’d be less inclined to because we had a great night. We won the debate. We had a terrible, a terrible network,” he told Fox News of the prospect of a second clash with Harris.
“They lost very badly, the first thing they did is ask for a debate,” he added. “They always ask for a rematch.”
