The Patriot Post® · Trump Weaves Away With Rogan

“He’s got this ability to just keep going,” said an admiring Joe Rogan the day after. “This is what’s crazy, like the podcast was three hours long. The guy didn’t pee before the podcast. He didn’t pee after the podcast. He just left.”

Peeing is for sissies.

It was the day after, and Rogan was speaking about his podcast’s biggest “get” ever, Donald Trump, who sat for a far-ranging three-hour interview and came out fresh as a daisy. The discussion covered everything from “The View,” to “The Apprentice,” to his decision to run for president, to his inauguration, to the beauty of the White House, to Abraham Lincoln’s “melancholia,” to Robert E. Lee’s military genius — and that was just the first 12 minutes. The remaining 168 minutes, though, were also worth the watch, if only to get a sense of Trump’s energy and his ability to tirelessly and engagingly riff on whatever topic Rogan brought up.

Is this a great country or what? Only in America, as The Babylon Bee jokes, can a 78-year-old former fast food fry cook score a three-hour interview with America’s most popular podcaster.

And so, with exactly one week to go until a presidential election that he seems well positioned to win, Trump has again proved that culture is king in politics and that he’s in complete command of it.

First, it was the McDonald’s fry-flipping coup and the iconic image of a smiling Trump there at the drive-thru window — bright white shirt, cufflinks, red tie, blue apron — smiling and waving to a customer as he drives away. There’s the blue-collar billionaire, flipping fries at a fast food joint outside of Philly, connecting with everyday folks while reminding them that Kamala Harris (probably) never worked at McDonald’s, even though she keeps saying she did, without evidence, as the mainstream media fact-checkers might put it if they were honest.

Next, it was his appearance on Rogan’s show. It was important, too, because Rogan’s is the most popular podcast on Spotify, with more than 14 million followers. In addition, his YouTube channel has nearly 18 million followers.

And on Sunday night, it was that six-hour gig at a packed Madison Square Garden in New York City — an event that the mainstream media likened to a 1930s Nazi rally but that failed miserably due to all the blacks and browns and Hindus and Jews sporting MAGA yarmulkes.

As for the Rogan event, Trump used it to reach an audience of mostly young men that he might not otherwise reach, at least not directly. In the few days since its posting, the interview has netted a staggering 37 million views.

During a moment when Rogan was allowed to speak, he noted the switch that the two political parties have made in the era of Trump: “The rebels are Republicans now, though, like you want to be invisible, you want to be punk rock, you want to like, buck the system? You’re a conservative now,” he said. “That’s how crazy. And then the liberals are now pro-silencing criticism. They’re pro-censorship online. … They come in regulating free speech and now regulating the First Amendment. It’s bananas to watch.”

At the 208:50 mark of the interview, Trump is still going mercilessly strong, and he’s talking about Kamala Harris taking days off during the stretch run, and he thus explains the difference between a presidential candidate who can do what he’s doing and a presidential candidate who can’t:

It’s the home stretch. Who would take a day off? So we have 11 days left now. And think of it. I think I’ve gone 54 or 55 days in a row, no days off. And I make speeches oftentimes, y'know, sometimes not, but I make speeches. And when you make a speech — and my speeches last a long time because of the weave, y'know, I mean, I weave stories into it, and, if you don’t, if you just read a teleprompter, nobody’s gonna be very excited, ya gotta weave it out, so, but you always have to, as you say, you always have to get back to what, otherwise it’s no good — but the weave is very, very, important. Very few weavers around.

If you got a bit dizzy reading that — and I did, because I transcribed it, and because it’s hard to figure out where the parenthetical starts and where it ends — imagine three straight hours of it. Trump’s performance was at once fascinating and relentless. The. Dude. Just. Doesn’t. Stop. We got a sense of this a couple of weeks ago when he went toe to toe with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait during a 90-minute tour de force at the Economic Club of Chicago.

Our Mark Alexander had the same sense of it: “I think the most important thing about this interview is that you see how relentless Trump can be. I bet Rogan had to take a nap! Despite his ramblings and the fact that you think it’s going to take a whiteboard to figure out how he got from point A to point B, he repeatedly circled back around to the original question and answered it.”

Take his explanation of the biggest mistake of his first term in office:

The one question that you’ll ask me that I think you’ll ask me that people seem to ask — and I always come up with the same answer — if I, the one mistake because I had a lot of success, great economy, great everything, everything was great with the military rebuilt, the biggest tax cuts in history, all the stuff we did, we had a great presidency. Three Supreme Court justices. Most people get none. You know, you pick them young, this way they’re there for 50 years. Right. So, you know, even if a president is there for eight years, oftentimes, they never have a chance. I had three. It was the luck of the draw. But I will say that it always comes back to the same answer. The biggest mistake I made was I picked some people, I picked some great people, you know, but you don’t think about that. I picked some people that I shouldn’t have picked. I picked a few people that I shouldn’t have picked.

The CliffsNotes version: Trump picked a few people that he shouldn’t have picked. But then you miss the weave. And you miss the thing that makes Trump Trump.

“Can you imagine Kamala doing this show?” Trump asks at one point.

The question answers itself.