The Long Road to Austin
Donald Trump’s appearance on Joe Rogan is a watershed moment for new media.
The 2024 election will be “decided by podcasts,” Bobby Kennedy predicted in 2023—and that may be the line for which he is best remembered. The election is still a coin toss, but Trump has had momentum recently and may well have sealed a win this weekend with his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast—which, to me, felt like an historical moment. The significance of that appearance wasn’t just for this election. It was the moment where new media decisively replaced old.
Harris has done well in everything related to more traditional mass media. She presided over a successful Democratic National Convention. She out-debated Trump. But, around her, the hold of mass media is rapidly collapsing. Her anodyne 60 Minutes interview did more harm than good—the interview was almost perfectly bland, and all that anybody will remember of it is the revelation that 60 Minutes appeared to give her a mulligan on a muffed answer. Her brave decision to appear on Fox News may well have backfired—with Bret Baier subjecting her to a stinging interview that put Harris constantly on the defensive. And, in a real stab-in-the-back, both The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times—or, more specifically, their techie owners—broke with long-held precedent at the worst possible time to refrain from endorsing candidates.
None of this is Harris’ fault, exactly, but she’s fighting today’s war with yesterday’s weapons—or, more precisely, the weapons of several election cycles ago. Trump has consistently been ahead of her on podcasts. He reached out to podcasts first in this cycle, took the initiative by doing more of them and forcing Harris to play catch-up, and by landing the biggest fish—Joe Rogan—who had been on the fence for most of the election but seemed to move to the Trump camp with his largely fawning questions.
The interview itself wasn’t particularly remarkable. Trump sounded like himself, made his usual points, sometimes veered off into incoherence—“your weave is getting wide,” Rogan had to admonish him. The point is that it seemed like an absolutely natural extension of the best-available mass media at this moment in time. It felt like a fireside chat, or like an old man sitting on the porch shooting the breeze—it was part kvetch, part kibitz, part reminiscence, strolling around topics as far afield as life on Mars and tariffs in the McKinley administration. There was little real substance—Trump isn’t any more likely to abolish taxes on tips than he is to abolish the income tax as a whole—but none of that matters. Listen to somebody for long enough, in that kind of cozy format, and with Rogan often teeing up Trump with talking points, and anything they say starts to seem like common sense.
What matters here is that Rogan has somewhere on the order of 20 to 30 million listeners, around three times that of 60 Minutes, and that those listeners who happen to be undecided—which is likely a lot of them—will be far more likely to swing to Trump after his Rogan appearance. The Harris campaign’s excuse for declining to appear on Rogan—that campaign scheduling constraints prevented an appearance—is preposterous and, taken at its face value, utterly atavistic. There is no number of whistlestop campaign rallies Harris can do in the closing days of the election that will come anywhere close to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of undecided voters she failed to reach by not doing Rogan.
There’s something else about podcasts like Rogan’s that the Beltway crowd completely fails to appreciate and which has to do with trust. Rogan himself put it perfectly early in the interview. With Trump being unusually coquettish about the source of his own popularity, Rogan explained it for him. “[It’s] ‘cause people were tired of [politicians] talking in this bullshit prepared politician lingo and even if they didn’t agree with you, they at least knew, whoever that guy is, that’s him, that’s really him,” Rogan said. “When you see people talk, some people in the public eye, you don’t know who they are, you have no idea who they are … they have these pre-planned answers, they say everything as if it’s rehearsed, you never get to the meat of it.”
What has happened in our time is that the basic structure of public trust has changed. Trust no longer comes from the sense that those in the center, and in authority, have the answers—it’s not Eisenhower’s grin, Walter Cronkite’s glasses, or some president sitting with hands folded over a desk and speaking into the camera. Trust comes from the sense of immediacy and naturalness—from believing that the person you’re speaking with is communicating from their own heart and their own experience. If we were to superimpose the history of acting over the history of politics, it would be that the stentorian style of 19th century acting has finally given way to the naturalistic style of acting that came in in the ‘60s—and the emphasis now is all about being yourself as much as possible, as opposed to projecting authority. As the old saw has it, “Everything is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”
It should be said here that Trump isn’t particularly a master of the new media. When he talks, he’s all over the place. He has trouble concentrating for more than a few seconds on anything that isn’t himself. As fawning as Rogan could be, he frequently seemed to be frustrated that Trump was so much more voluble and distractible than the Atlantis archeologists and JFK assassination experts who comprise Rogan’s usual guest list. Where Trump is far ahead of the curve, though, is that he really is a good student of media studies. He doesn’t try to round everything he sees into a talking point. He never hired media consultants who would have only sanded away his personality. He understands that media is as simple as politics—it’s really just about reaching the most people possible, and that the way to do that is to adjust to whatever media format is prevailing at any given moment. All good campaigners understand this. For Abraham Lincoln, it was to debate his Senate opponent in every single congressional district in his state. For Franklin Roosevelt, it was to make use of radio. For John Kennedy, it was to make sure he had color in his face for his television debate. For politicians now, it’s about adjusting to podcasts and livestreams.
The Democrats have had eight years to adjust to the new media landscape. They had time to develop a more casual, social media-friendly voice. They had time to develop a cohort of younger, fresher party leaders. They had time to junk the media consultants and speaking techniques that are a holdover from the era of cable television—when political speech was organized around avoiding bad soundbites. They had time to adjust to the new world of podcasts, which is tailor-made for political persuasion. They did none of that. If Harris loses—as currently seems more likely than not—the Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves.
Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
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It's easy to see why Trump rubs people the wrong way but he puts it out there, he is not trying to hide who he is. Whether you love him or despise him, he is a real person and it shows. Harris strikes me as a highly insecure but highly ambitious person who has no real sense of herself except in relation to whomever or whatever she is in the presence of. She's always trying to figure out what person to be what words to say for this audience. It shows. So people can't get hold of her. That essentially feels untrustworthy. Respectfully, I think Mr. Kahn has presented a pretty thoughtful perspective that was one of the most interesting things I've read lately and I've read quite a bit. How candidates handle themselves both scripted and unscripted is of critical importance. Imagine a one on one with a world leader. You have to know who you are to hold your own and ad lib, talk extemporaneously etc. It's hard to imagine her holding her center and doing that successfully if she can't handle a Joe Rogan interview.
I reread this essay to see if I could find anything objectionable. I didn’t. In fact, I found it to be an accurate assessment of the current political landscape.