MAGA Podcaster Slams DHS for Including Him in Their Deportation Video

Add Theo Von to the list of Trump-supporting comedians who are finally realizing that this brutal deportation campaign is indeed what they voted for.

On Tuesday evening, the official Homeland Security X account posted yet another bizarrely aesthetic, meme deportation video with a viral TikTok sound in the background.

The video opens with Von—who hosted President Trump and Vice President JD Vance on his podcast last year, and attended the inaugration—bluntly saying, “Heard you got deported, dude. Bye,” in response to a fan asking him to record a message for their recently deported friend. The rest of the video details DHS’s arrest and deportation numbers.

The borrowed clip was from January, when MAGA shill Benny Johnson and others on the right applauded Von. “Theo Von is all of us,” Johnson said at the time.

Now Von is having the same second thoughts that many MAGA-leaning comedians who openly endorsed Trump are having.

“Yooo DHS i didnt approve to be used in this. I know you know my address so send a check. And please take this down and please keep me out of your ‘banger’ deportation videos,” Von posted late on Tuesday night. “When it comes to immigration my thoughts and heart are alot more nuanced than this video allows. Bye!”

Von is reaping what he happily sowed. He had the president and his vice president on his podcast during the campaign to talk about cocaine, was a guest at the inauguration, has traveled with the president since then, and is now the unwilling face of deportation. (Additionally, asking for DHS to cut you a check before asking to take the video down is tacky at best, but what else is to be expected from the podcaster?)

Von isn’t the only “funny” guy regretting his decision to cozy up to Trump. In July, podcaster Joe Rogan expressed his shock and horror at Trump deporting innocent people with no criminal records.

“We were told there would be no—well, there’s two things that are insane. One is the targeting of migrant workers. Not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers,” he said. “Just construction workers showing up in construction sites and raiding them. Gardeners. Like, really?”

Comedian Andrew Schultz felt similarly.

“Everything [Trump] campaigned on I believe he wanted to do. And now he’s doing the exact opposite thing of every single fuckin’ thing,” Schultz said on his Flagrant podcast in July. “There’ll be people that like, they’ll DM me and be like, ‘You see what your boy’s doing? You voted for this.’ I’m like, I voted for none of this!”

All of these men are foolish for thinking Trump just wouldn’t be as brutal as he had promised over and over again he would be. It absolutely is what they voted for. Maybe next time they’ll think about this before they pick up the microphone.

As Donald Trump’s allies and the Federal Communications Commissions chair scramble to pretend that the censorship of Jimmy Kimmel Live! was anything other than the president wanting to control the media, Trump himself revealed the truth while issuing a threat to ABC.

In a Truth Social post published an hour before the show returned to air Tuesday, Trump decried ABC’s decision to reverse its cancellation, accusing the network of being too favorable to his political opponents, and threatened to again go “after them.”

“I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled!” the president wrote, later adding, “Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE. He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution.

“I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative,” he continued, referring to a $15 million settlement ABC News paid to Trump’s presidential library last year to settle a defamation suit.

Since Kimmel’s censorship, FCC Chair Brendan Carr and others have argued that the decision was the result of private entities making independent decisions about what to air (no matter that Carr had threatened companies that platformed the late-night host, or that the broadcasting companies that have yanked the show accordingly happen to have major business before the agency he heads).

In 136 words, the president blew all MAGA rationalizations out of the water: Trump just wants to punish media figures he deems guilty of lèse-majesté against him.

After spending months making concessions to Russia, Donald Trump has suddenly changed his tune on the foreign power’s invasion of Ukraine, claiming that the non-NATO ally could reclaim all of its occupied territory—and then some.

“After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” Trump posted on Truth Social Tuesday.

Trump suggested that Ukraine had a fair shot at reclaiming its “original borders” so long as it received the financial support of Europe and NATO. Trump further derided Russia as a “paper tiger” that had, in its failure to completely decimate Ukraine, shown the international community that it was not a genuine military threat.

The president’s comments, which followed a raving speech he delivered before the U.N. General Assembly earlier Tuesday, were a stark reversal of his historically soft approach to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump has little to show for the profound international recognition he’s offered the Kremlin over the course of his second administration. Against the advice of world leaders, Trump invited Putin to Alaska in August—tasking U.S. soldiers to literally roll out the red carpet for the Russian dictator. It was the first time that Putin had stepped foot on U.S. soil in more than a decade.

But the unprecedented reception did not inspire the Kremlin to budge on its peace terms. The superpower has instead insisted on receiving “international legal recognition” of its 2014 annexation of Crimea, an internationally recognized portion of Ukraine, along with four regions it has claimed in the three years since it first invaded Ukraine.

“When the people living in Moscow, and all of the Great Cities, Towns, and Districts all throughout Russia, find out what is really going on with this War … Ukraine would be able to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that!” Trump wrote, promising an uninterrupted supply of weapons to NATO allies. “Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble, and this is the time for Ukraine to act.”

Notably, Trump has dramatically changed the nature of U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Since taking office, he has railed that the U.S. was getting the short end of the stick and forced the switch to a plan where Washington and its allies supply Ukraine with arms from American stocks using funds from other NATO members.

At one point, the Trump administration stopped aid to Ukraine altogether—a move that was quickly reversed when it was revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had authorized the pause without actually telling Trump.

With Jimmy Kimmel Live! returning to the air Tuesday evening, the Federal Communications Commission chair who jawboned ABC and companies that own its stations into censoring Jimmy Kimmel can’t keep himself from weighing in on the affair.

While ABC on Monday reversed its decision to cancel the show, Sinclair Broadcast Group, followed by Nexstar Media Group, announced that they will not air the show on the roughly 70 ABC affiliates owned across the country between them.

The companies first pulled Kimmel’s show last week, after FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened those who platform the comedian following a joke he made about Trump and MAGA’s response to the death of Charlie Kirk. Both companies have business before the FCC, which helps explain their swift and ongoing capitulation to Carr. (Nexstar is pursuing a multibillion-dollar merger that would expand its reach to 80 percent of TV households in the country—a number so large that it would require the FCC to lift the existing 39-percent cap limiting companies’ reach.)

Carr, who has spent the past week trying to paint the incident as anything other than a patent instance of a government official applying pressure to influence private decision-making, was delighted by the news that Sinclair and Nexstar won’t change their stance.

Carr took to X to lash out against Democratic state Senator Scott Wiener, who reacted to the news of Sinclair’s decision to keep Kimmel censored despite ABC’s reversal by proposing breaking up the massive conglomerate. “Corporate media consolidation doesn’t jibe with democracy,” Wiener wrote, in a post published before Nexstar followed in Sinclair’s footsteps.

Carr argued that Wiener’s statement showed that it’s Democrats—not Republicans—who are the censorial ones. Nexstar and Sinclair, he claimed, had decided independently that suspending Kimmel “made sense.”

Wiener responded in disbelief at the FCC chair’s hypocrisy: “Do you people hear yourselves?? BREAK UP SINCLAIR.”

Carr fired off another tweet, in which he attempted to describe the incident—in which two of the country’s largest, and ever consolidating, media conglomerates, are truckling to an agency whose approval they need—as a heartwarming underdog story. Democrats, he said, “simply can’t stand that local TV stations—for the first time in years—stood up to a national programmer” in ABC.

President Trump repeatedly blamed the United Nations for his teleprompter issues and a malfunctioning escalator in a spiteful Tuesday speech to the General Assembly. But it seems that both issues were caused directly by his own team.

“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle,” Trump said after claiming to have brought so much peace and prosperity to the world without any international assistance. “If the first lady wasn’t in great shape, she would’ve fallen. But she’s in great shape … and then a teleprompter that didn’t work. These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. Thank you very much.”

But according to the Associated Press’s Farnoush Amiri, an anonymous U.N. official said the escalator in question was actually stopped prematurely by someone from Trump’s group, who ran ahead of the group and accidentally triggered a stop mechanism. The official added that the teleprompter that Trump was so upset about was also being operated by his White House.

Trump’s churlish speech—and his faulty finger-pointing—only further display how isolating his presidency has been on an international level. Trump’s constant hammering of the U.N. may cause countries that once depended on us as allies to go elsewhere, or strengthen their relationships without us.