Joe rogan

After the Harris/Walz campaign blew over $1 billion, its top managers joined their first interview post-election on Pod Save America to explain what went wrong. Their excuses range from having less than 107 days instead of a year and a half, the fact that Harris wasn’t elected via the “traditional” route, the “political environment” — meaning Biden and Kamala’s poor approval ratings — along with Donald Trump, Donald Trump and Donald Trump. “They don’t pretend to have all the answers here,” host Dan Pfeiffer started the podcast. “There’s way more to cover than we could possibly cover in one podcast.” Though you may struggle to believe it, the hour and thirty-five-minute interview only got worse from there.

Democracy won, apparently. More than 73 million people voted for Donald J. Trump, who won 312 Electoral College votes and the popular vote, making him the 45th and 47th president of the United States. In the end, it wasn’t particularly close, and the exit polls from the night paint a pretty bleak picture for Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party. By now, you will have read most of the breakdowns — she lost ground with Hispanics, whites, blacks, married people, non-college-educated people, et cetera. In fact, the only demographic group that she gained ground with was college-educated white women — she even somehow managed to lose ground from 2016 and 2020 with black women, a stunning and impressive feat. Tim Walz lost his home district in deep-blue Minnesota.

Donald Trump has won the presidency for a second time — but the real surprise is the coalition of voters that put him there. Women showed up less for Kamala Harris than they did for Joe Biden, Trump’s white working-class base didn’t falter, and Arab Americans made their mark in Dearborn, Michigan. But the most notable gains for the GOP, however, were with Hispanic men and young men. With Hispanic men, according to CNN exit polls, the shift is remarkable: from +31 for Hillary Clinton, to +23 for Joe Biden, to +10 to Trump. Lots of credit is due to the burgeoning Spanish-speaking conservative media. With young men, the trend is even more eye-opening.

Every election has winners and losers that extend beyond the politicians themselves, but in this particularly unique situation, the sheer number of outside individuals, movements and institutions who can be categorized as winning or losing based on last night’s sweeping result for Donald Trump and Republicans is astounding.  Winner: the bro army and its defenders. The decision to lean so hard into appealing to the American manosphere, with its testosterone-fueled UFC events and a litany of podcasts hosted by comedians with mass appeal to young men, ran the risk of turning off female voters or seeming to only prioritize the frat vote. But it proved absolutely correct — and not just the Joe Rogan interview, though that was a key step in the journey.

For most of American history, elections took a long time. Many of the gaps that still exist today between when counts begin, when certification happens, when electors meet and when the next winner is sworn in exist as a vestige of a past where lengthy travel and slow word of mouth meant people just did not know what had happened for quite some time. Election results happened at a distance. This created its own set of problems in the application of authority, but now we are dealing with something of a different nature: a demand for immediacy that throws patience aside and views every delay as suspicious. It’s one reason that we used to speak to each other in paragraphs, then in lines and phrases — now we can only manage memes.

Donald Trump’s podcast bonanza just paid off with the biggest win possible: a formal endorsement from Joe Rogan, whose massive audience has been coveted by both Trump and Kamala Harris in the final days of the election. In Rogan’s latest episode, with top Trump surrogate and X CEO Elon Musk, the two talked for almost three hours in Rogan’s Austin studio — standard fare for his show, which was apparently too much for the sitting vice president, whose team would only agree to an hour-long interview on the road, which never occurred. But the most important takeaway came when Rogan posted the episode, along with his commentary. “If it wasn't for [Musk] we'd be fucked,” Rogan wrote.