Fox News (Yes, Really!) Exposes Joe Rogan’s Shady Pro-Trump Move

Even Fox News has raised its eyebrows at podcasting behemoth Joe Rogan’s decision not to interview Vice President Kamala Harris despite penning in a three-hour slot for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

During a Sunday discussion on the network between Fox News host Howard Kurtz and pundit Caroline Downey, the MediaBuzz anchor claimed that it was Rogan who had stiffed the Harris campaign.

Downey argued that the lopsided interview opportunity proved a “net benefit” to Trump’s campaign, since “every TV hit that Kamala Harris does, she comes off more bitter, more angry, and more jaded, whereas Trump comes off as a normal guy.”

“So, you know, Kamala Harris claims she’s trying to cater to the younger generation, but she’s sticking to legacy media interviews for the most part, and she refused to go on Rogan,” Downey said.

But Kurtz was quick to push back on Downey’s behind-the-scenes speculation.

“Well, no, I don’t think that’s true. I think she wanted to go on Joe Rogan, and I don’t think Rogan wanted her,” Kurtz said. “I think it would have been a good thing if she’d gone.”

“So, even though Rogan, I believe, has refused to have Trump on in the past, he seemed largely sympathetic to the former president, and you heard him dismiss the media as a bunch of left-wing Democrats,” the host added.

In recent weeks, Trump has dodged mainstream news appearances, including going so far as to break election tradition by refusing to sit for a 60 Minutes interview in September, which he reportedly backed out of last-minute over fears that the rigorous show would fact-check him.

Instead, Trump has relegated his TV appearances to friendlier, more sycophantic networks, including Fox News, whose anchor Maria Bartiromo did not interrupt or correct Trump when he claimed that the real Election Day threat is the “enemy from within” while suggesting that the military should forcibly involve itself in handling the election results.

But a chat with Rogan—who hosts one of the biggest podcasts in the country for Republican and independent men—has the potential to significantly sway undecided voters for either candidate.

Donald Trump says that he and Speaker Mike Johnson have a dirty “little secret.”

Speaking at a rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Trump seemed to tell his fans that he and the Republican House speaker have a plan to make sure that Republicans clinch victory in the House and the presidential election.

“I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact,” Trump said, before claiming he’d only reveal the secret after the election.

Though it’s unclear exactly what the plan may be, the implication is not subtle: Johnson is ready to help Trump win the election. As Politico noted, these “sinister comments … could be a reference to the House settling a contested election.”

Some in Congress agree, even sounding alarms about the comments. “I think the secret yesterday that he [Donald Trump] referenced very likely may relate to his compact with Mike Johnson to—as a back-up plan for when he loses—to overturn this election on January 6,” said Representative Daniel Goldman on Monday morning.

Before he was elected speaker, Johnson played a key role in the efforts to stop the certification of the 2020 election results, taking the lead in filing a briefing in a lawsuit to stop Joe Biden’s victory.

On Sunday, Johnson also told Axios that he has a “very close working relationship with President Trump and consider[s] him now a close friend.”

“I know that’s mutual,” Johnson continued. “[Trump] tells me how much confidence he has in my leadership.”

“He’s going to be around for a long time, I predict,” said Trump at the rally.

Senator Lindsay Graham’s attack on “dangerous” rhetoric calling Donald Trump a fascist got promptly shut down by video evidence of the former president calling Kamala Harris a fascist. 

Last week, retired Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, said the former president fell under “the general definition of fascist.” Mark Esper, the former defense secretary, said that he agreed with Kelly’s assessment. Earlier this month, it was reported that retired General Mark Milley called Trump “fascist to the core.”

These statements predictably sent Trump into a rage, and Graham attempted to smear the Republican presidential candidate’s critics Sunday for trying to sound the alarm about their former boss.  

“He’s not a fascist. He’s not Hitler, and that just shows you how desperate this campaign is,” Graham said during an appearance on ABC’s This Week with host Jonathan Karl. 

These generals are “trying to turn joy into fear,” Graham cried, as if he were not defending the candidate who, just this weekend, falsely claimed American cities had been “invaded and conquered” by immigrants. 

Graham became hysterical as he claimed Trump’s critics had “turned America upside-down” by “using rhetoric that is dangerous and off-base” to “try to scare Americans.” The South Carolina Republican also claimed the former White House advisers had “called [Trump] Hitler,” which they didn’t.

“Now you have been very critical of the generals, two of them using the word ‘fascist.’ Mitch McConnell and Speaker Mike Johnson have been very critical, saying ‘This is inciting violence,’ ‘How dare you call Donald Trump a fascist?’ Let me just play you a little bit about what Donald Trump has had to say about Kamala Harris,” Karl said. 

Cut to an edit of Trump calling Harris a fascist over and over again. 

“The true divide in American politics today is between these far-left fascists led by Harris and her group,” Trump said at a rally on August 23.

“We have a fascist person running, who’s incompetent,” Trump said again, just three days later. 

“She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist—she’s not actually a socialist,” Trump said. 

During a rambling speech in Los Angeles in September, Trump called Harris a “radical left, Marxist, communist, fascist,” though such a person could not, ideologically, exist. 

Graham was quick to make his own attitudes clear, in light of Trump’s rhetoric. “Why don‘t you ask me, ‘Do I think Kamala Harris is a fascist?’ No. Do I think she’s a communist? No. I think she’s the most liberal person to ever be dominated by a major party. I think she’s ineffective, I think she’s incompetent,” Graham said.

Rather than address how brutally ridiculous he just made himself look, the South Carolina Republican started rattling off a stump speech against Harris.

Karl pushed Graham to acknowledge Trump’s “stronger” language. 

“You’re not having Senator Lindsey Graham say she’s a fascist, she’s just incompetent,” Graham sputtered, as Karl brought their interview to a close. 

Last week, more than a dozen officials agreed with Kelly’s assessment that Trump is a fascist, stating that “this is who Donald Trump is” in a letter published Friday. 

Choosing Madison Square Garden as the New York City venue to showcase Donald Trump’s vengeful and divisive rhetoric had already evoked connections to the pro-Nazi rally held in the same location in 1939. But who Trump chose to platform at the event Sunday, and what they said, suggested that the comparisons weren’t far off.

Speaking before thousands at “The World’s Most Famous Arena,” Trump’s guests leaned into the white nationalist “great replacement theory,” donned Nazi-adjacent iconography, and aggressively defined the idea of who is—and who is not—an American.

“The cartels are gone, the criminal migrants are gone, the gangs are gone, America is for Americans and Americans only,” said Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Trump known for his vicious anti-immigrant policies. “One man, and that man, ladies and gentlemen, that man took a bullet for you, he took a bullet for democracy.”

Tech billionaire Elon Musk also attended the Manhattan event, wearing a full black getup that he described as “dark, gothic MAGA.” But critics noticed something strange on the front of Musk’s hat. Instead of using the normal font seen on Trump’s red “Make America Great Again” caps, Musk opted for something decidedly more Germanic: the Fraktur font, popularized during the early years of the Nazi regime.

Another guest at the blue-state campaign stop was podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe, who launched the lineup with a crass joke about Latinos, claiming that the ethnic group loves “making babies” before mocking Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.”

Ex–Fox host Tucker Carlson also made an appearance, choosing in part to make fun of Vice President Kamala Harris’s mixed-race heritage.

“It’s gonna be pretty hard [for Democrats] to look at us and say, ‘You know what? Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive,’” he mocked. “As the first Samoan-Malaysian low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. It was just a groundswell of popular support.’”

But not all of the fascist appeals stemmed from Trump’s allies. After allowing Republicans to flounder for weeks while attempting to justify or brush aside his controversial “enemy from within” remarks, Trump himself suddenly decided to double down on authoritarian language.

“They’re smart and they’re vicious, and we have to defeat them,” he said. “And when I say ‘the enemy from within,’ the other side goes crazy. Becomes a sound—‘Oh, how can he say’—no, they’ve done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within.”

Forget firing, Donald Trump just pitched having special counsel Jack Smith deported.

During a rambling radio interview on 77WABC’s Cats & Cosby Thursday, Trump threw out Smith’s name when asked about his plans for immigration. 

“Domestically, what could America look like if it continues to have this open border policy that we have seen?” asked host Rita Cosby.

“We can’t have it, it’s, it’s not sustainable, it has to be shut immediately and you have to let people in, but they have to come in legally and you have to get the killers, the murderers, and the mentally deranged, you have to get them out. And we should throw Jack Smith out with them,” Trump said. 

“The mentally deranged people, Jack Smith should be considered mentally deranged and he should be thrown out of the country,” Trump continued. 

Trump seemed to pluck Smith’s name out of thin air, as the special counsel had not yet come up in the interview. Smith has overseen two investigations into Trump, one regarding his alleged efforts to overturn the election results in 2020, and another into his alleged mishandling of classified documents.  

This isn’t the first time Trump has threatened to deport those in the country legally. The former president has repeatedly made threats to deport immigrants who have entered the country under temporary protected status and humanitarian parole.

Shortly before claiming that he would deport one of his political enemies, who is attempting to hold him accountable for his alleged crimes, Trump tried desperately to defend himself from claims that he was a fascist. 

The former president went on a tirade against his former chief of staff, retired U.S. general John Kelly, who said that Trump fell into the “general definition of fascist.” Trump claimed Kelly was simply angry he’d been fired.

Trump went on a wild rant calling Kelly a “stupid person,” “a bully who made up stories,” and “a man of rather low intelligence, who was a tough guy who became a marshmallow.” He swerved into complaints about former Secretaries of Defense Mark Esper and James Mattis, and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. 

This is Trump’s second threat against Smith in as many days. Trump vowed Thursday to “fire” Smith on his first day in office, in hopes of washing his hands of the two federal cases against him.