Is Joe Rogan Really Turning on Trump?

In some ways yes. In many ways, not really.

Post by Charlie Sabgir and Naisha Roy

Since America’s podcast king platformed and endorsed Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 election, The Joe Rogan Experience has become required listening for political strategists and curious liberals alike. Ideologically elastic, viscerally anti-establishment, and, like many an American, often drawn to charisma over ideology, Rogan is arguably the nation’s swingiest of swing voters.

His influence is hard to overstate. Edison Podcast Metrics estimates his weekly reach around 26 million Americans and 5.7 million men aged 18-29. His Instagram following is 20 million strong, equivalent to or surpassing the likes of Tom Brady, Serena Williams, and Kamala Harris. Among young men (18-29), his weekly reach is almost six times that of the second most popular podcaster, Theo Von.

To be sure, not every Rogan follower buys what he’s selling, whether that be UFO conspiracies or vaccine denialism. Young Men Research Project’s summer 2025 poll found that while 39 percent of men aged 18-29 familiar with Rogan both like and trust his views, half either don’t trust him (25%) or actively dislike his content (25%). Still, that 39% rate topped most of the influencers surveyed, including Ben Shapiro (25%), Hasan Piker (26%), and Elon Musk (37%). And according to Edison’s data, over half of his audience (~54%) is politically independent or Democrat. In other words, Rogan’s influence is real, and his words deserve attention.

So when clips go viral of the podcaster bashing ICE and calling the recent raids a “distraction” from the Epstein files, it’s no surprise that media and political commentators are quick to seize on these snippets as evidence that Rogan is turning on the president he helped elect. The Wall Street Journal asked whether Trump is “Losing Joe Rogan, America’s Most Important Swing Voter?” describing him as an “essential barometer of national sentiment.”

To move beyond 30-second clips and understand how Rogan’s views have meaningfully changed—if at all—we analyzed the past 13 months of Joe Rogan podcasts, from January 1, 2025, to January 30, 2026.

Using transcript scraping tools, we extracted statements containing keywords such as “immigration,” “immigrants,” “ICE,” “undocumented,” “asylum,” and related terms.

After removing irrelevant statements, two independent coders analyzed 224 total statements (or quotes)—153 from 2025 and 71 from January 2026. Statements were defined as discrete excerpts in which Rogan or a guest expressed a complete thought or argument about immigration—the median length of each statement was around 550 characters.

Each statement was coded for overall sentiment: (a) Pro-Immigrant/Anti-Trump, (b) Anti-Immigrant/Pro-Trump, (c) Nuanced or neutral statements, or (d) Humorous. Next, coders marked which themes appeared within each statement. Themes were not mutually exclusive:

• Threat or crisis- migrant crisis, open borders, invasion, criminals, human trafficking, assimilation problems, European crisis*, sanctuary cities (in negative light)

• Taking jobs, resources, or depressing wages

• Democratic conspiracy- to bring in Democratic voters and/or inflate Census numbers in swing states

• Trump-critical- excessive cruelty, deporting/detaining non-criminals, etc.

• Need better system- need for better pathways to citizenship, a more balanced approach, immigration as non-zero-sum

• Ploy for control- mass immigration as a way to control the citizenry (often used in the context of the UK and Europe)

*European immigration was discussed only a handful of times. When it was, it was often framed in similar terms to U.S. immigration. Accordingly, we decided to include it.

Limitations:

• Speaker identification: Transcripts don’t differentiate quotes between guests. However, recurring phrases helped identify Rogan’s views. The “theme” section was included to track such recurring arguments.

• Search completeness: Relevant segments may have fallen outside of the search parameters. Additionally, captured statements occasionally lacked full conversational context. In this case, coders consulted the full transcripts.

• Duration not measured: This analysis measures the frequency of statements, not the duration of discussion or airtime devoted to each perspective.

• Guest inflation: Immigration was discussed relatively evenly across 2025 guests, with a few exceptions. However, 2026 totals are inflated by Rogan’s extended conversation with Sen. Rand Paul, skewing results more anti-immigrant.

Findings:

Immigration was discussed in 65 of Rogan’s 209 episodes since January 2025—about 31 percent overall, peaking in Q2 2025 (36%, or 17 of 47 shows) and dipping in Q4 2025 (24%, or 12 of 49 episodes). Overall, 57 percent of the analyzed statements (88 of 153) in 2025 were anti-immigrant and/or pro-Trump. Twenty-four percent (37 of 153) were nuanced or neutral, and 18 percent (28 of 153) were pro-immigrant and/or critical of Trump.

The graph above shows the percentage of shows per quarter that were predominantly anti-immigrant (or pro-Trump), pro-immigrant (or anti-Trump), or nuanced/neutral. Episode sentiment was determined by whichever sentiment appeared most frequently. For example, an episode with five statements—four anti-immigrant, one nuanced—was classified as anti-immigrant. In cases of ties between nuanced and positive or negative statements, the episode was coded as the non-nuanced sentiment. There were no cases where pro- and anti-immigration sentiments were equal.

In Q1 2025, discourse was almost exclusively anti-immigrant and/or supportive of the Trump Administration. However, this shifted in Q2 2025 (April through June 2025), as the administration’s crackdown became more mixed and pro-immigrant. While guests like Luis J. Gomez and James Talarico contributed to this shift, Rogan himself became more vocally critical during this period:

“Those people need a path to citizenship, man … these people are in this constant state of anxiety and then they hear about the ICE raids, like at Home Depot. Like, what the fuck?”- Joe Rogan, from his episode with Oliver Anthony

Still, anti-immigrant sentiment remained the norm rather than the exception, partially recovering in Q3 and Q4 as a percentage of overall shows.

Theme Analysis:

The most common theme in 2025 was immigration as a threat/crisis—criticizing Biden’s “open borders,” depicting immigrants as criminals, discussing human trafficking, assimilation problems, and attacking sanctuary cities. This was trailed by statements about immigrants taking jobs, draining government resources, and depressing wages. Criticisms of the Trump administration ranked third. Selected quotes from Rogan, himself:

“You’ve had open borders for four years … they’ve let thousands and thousands of potential criminals in here, if not millions … of people who knows how many of these people are suspected terrorists. It’s not just one, it’s not zero. Okay. So what’s the number? I don’t know how many of ‘em are gang members. Is it zero? No, it’s not zero. So there’s, they let in gang members. Okay. How many of ‘em are in the cartel? It’s not zero. Okay. Well, what the fuck do you do?”- Joe Rogan with Jillian Michaels, coded as “Threat or Crisis”

“Once they got ‘em here, they did give them EBT cards. They did give them cell phones … They moved them into … Roosevelt Hotel … Filled with migrants. They paid for their food … They encourage people. They did have sanctuary cities where they weren’t gonna arrest them. They let them come in.”- Joe Rogan with Jack Carr, coded as “Taking Jobs, Resources, or Depressing Wages”

Rogan firmly believes that mass migration under Biden was an intentional ploy to rig elections and change census numbers for blue states, a point Elon Musk has also amplified.

“A lot of is because of political power. It’s congressional seats. ‘cause the census just counts people. They don’t count legal citizens. And when you let people come over here illegally and then you give them food and you give them Medicare, what is this? What happens is those people are gonna vote for you if they can. And they’re also gonna count. They’re gonna stay. … So if you get as many people in as possible, oh yeah. You can take over congressional seats. And if you make it really easy for those people to get by, like they say, Hey, California’s the place to go. They don’t give a fuck.”- Joe Rogan with Theo Von

The graph above tracks theme frequency per quarter throughout 2025, measured by total statements where each theme appears (not episodes). Threat/crisis narratives dominated early in 2025, fluctuated mid-year, then dropped significantly in Q4 2025. Conversely, criticism of the Trump administration grew from virtually nonexistent in Q1 to a central theme by year’s end, mirroring the national backlash. Portuguese journalist Mariana van Zeller’s October appearance—a strong defense of immigrants’ economic and cultural contributions—influenced this shift.

The visual above tracks episodes containing Trump administration criticism per quarter. Criticism was virtually absent in Q1 but grew steadily to eight episodes by Q4. The projected Q1 2026 figure of 16 episodes, based on January alone, reflects the accelerating critiques from Rogan and his guests.

Yet even as the absolute number of anti-Trump statements increase, the show’s ethos remains fundamentally bent around immigration as threatening, echoing the same sentiments that Rogan and his guests held before the 2024 election.

For example, in a recent episode with Ehsan Ahmad, Rogan argued that stories of bad apples crowd out the everyday interactions of ICE agents, drawing a parallel to police officers:

“The [ICE videos] that you see online are the horrible ones. So you think all cops are horrible. What you miss is the millions of interactions that people have with cops. Like, how you doing today, sir? Good sir. How you doing? Can I see your paperwork?

“With the ICE thing, what you’re only seeing and you’re only hearing about … American citizens that have been arrested, the lady that got shot … what you’re not hearing about is the number of violent criminals that they’ve caught, and it’s a lot.”- Joe Rogan, with Ehsan Ahmad

In that same conversation, Rogan defended the fact that only eight percent of the individuals detained by ICE in 2025 and 2026 had violent or serious property criminal convictions, effectively justifying the detention of false positives:

“Even if it’s eight percent, they’ve gotten rid of half a million people already … If you have cancer in eight percent of your body, I would say you’re fucked.”

Rogan and his guests continue to push the conspiracy theory that Democrats are importing immigrants to rig elections. In a recent episode with Andrew Wilson, Rogan agreed with the comedian when he said: “Well we’re fighting over the fact that … the left is just trying to ingratiate itself with power.”

And in his recent conversation with Sen. Rand Paul, Rogan raised concerns about the ease with which anyone can impersonate an ICE agent. Yet most of the episode was spent blaming Biden and Democrats for Trump’s actions, and focusing on alleged fraud in Minneapolis’s Somali communities. While Rogan occasionally mentions supporting a pathway to citizenship, these comments are often dwarfed by his focus on violent criminals crossing the border. Even in January 2026, when Trump-critical statements peaked, most quotes remained anti-immigrant and/or pro-Trump.

Perhaps the most important point about Joe Rogan to understand is that, more often than not, he prefers amity over confrontation. When someone presents a well-articulated, compassionate argument, he tends to nod along. When Mariana Van Zeller appeared in October and closed by urging viewers to “just have empathy … just try to to place yourself in somebody else’s shoes … try to understand why these migrants are coming to this country,” Rogan responded, “Absolutely … this is supposed to be the United States of America … we’re supposed to be a community.” He then agreed with Van Zeller that the country needs caring leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and James Talarico (high praise for the Texas Senate candidate).

But when Rogan hosts conspiracists, the two often feed off one another. Of eighteen coded statements from his recent conversation with Andrew Wilson, only three were classified as “nuanced,” one as “humorous,” and the remainder as anti-immigrant. Similarly, when Elon Musk appeared in October 2025, they bonded over claims that the left hopes to destroy Western civilization, discussed immigrants raping American women, the political incentives for Democrats in mass migration, and the suckling of resources by illegal immigrants.

To be clear, the viral clips of Rogan criticizing Trump do matter—especially for those not listening to his Avatar-length episodes. The evidence also shows that Rogan has grown more suspicious of ICE’s tactics and has long believed the U.S. needs a better system to help long-term undocumented workers.

But in the aggregate, his ideology still lies closer to the immigration agenda that helped bring Trump to power. He still suggests that Democrats orchestrated mass migration to rig elections, that millions of dangerous criminals flooded across the border, and that ICE is necessary to root out these individuals. Anti-Trump statements have increased, but they are outweighed by rhetoric framing immigration as a crisis; immigrants as stealing jobs or draining government resources, or migration as a Democratic ploy.

Rogan, like the young men who listen to him, isn’t bound to any individual, party, or ideology. Like Theo Von, Andrew Schulz, and the other podcasters who backed Trump in 2024, they pride themselves on calling balls and strikes as they see them. Yet this same independence cuts both ways. As ICE’s raids and arrests go viral, Rogan and his guests have grown less willing to associate themselves with a strategy they insist “wasn’t what they voted for.”

Could there be a breaking point? It’s possible. Yet for all the headlines, the conspiracies and crisis narratives haven’t changed all too much since November 2024.