Pods Damn America
Trump's podcast populism strategy made traditional media even more of an electoral irrelevance.
Previously: From Badenoch to worse
A look at how the press is responding to the election of the new Tory leader. And yes, the T-word comes up a lot...
The Undertaker was often terrifying in the wrestling ring but he’s a softie as an interviewer. “This is the Donald Trump that people don’t get to see,” he simpered on an episode of his Six Feet Under podcast released in October. “I know you’ve got that tough-guy persona, and that bravado, but this is good, this is fun… You’ve made politics fun again.” The interview was Trump’s 100th podcast appearance.
Where Trump’s 2016 campaign still heavily relied on set-piece interviews with traditional broadcasters and rambling call-ins to Fox News shows, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and CNN’s New Day, in 2024, he often swerved those venues. After his first debate with Kamala Harris on ABC News, his campaign declined a second clash and Trump pulled out of a planned interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes. Conversely, Harris did the show but declined the opportunity to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience, while Trump turned up for a freewheeling almost three-hour appearance which resulted in a late endorsement from the host. 60 Minutes averages 10.8 million viewers. Rogan’s Trump episode has racked up over 46 million views on YouTube alone.
Podcast appearances allowed Trump to duck scrutiny in favour of freewheeling chats. On Theo Von’s This Past Weekend, he talked about his late brother Fred Jr.’s battle with alcoholism. During his Six Feet Under episode, he reminded listeners of his appearance at Wrestlemania 23 in a ‘Battle of the Billionaires’ match against Vince McMahon. And on Barstool Sports’ Bussin’ with the Boys, he talked about playing American football as a young man. His appearance in June on Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast was one of the most wayward, with the conversations ricocheting from boxing to immigration to the existence of aliens. Trump claimed he was persuaded to do Paul’s show by his 18-year-old son, Barron.
In a speech at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago election celebration, UFC boss Dana White gave credit to podcasters, name-checking Von, Bussin’ With The Boys, streamer Adin Ross, pro-Trump Youtube pranksters the NELK boys, “and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan”.
If you watch that Rogan episode though — I recommend you don’t waste almost 3 hours of your life like I did — you’ll see that despite his eventual endorsement of Trump, the host got frustrated with his long rambling answers. Trump has called his meandering style of speech “the weave” and at one point Rogan told him, “Your weave is getting wide.” But regular Rogan listeners are used to these long and often unfocused conversations. Trump saying he would like to be a “whale psychiatrist” is the stuff of instant memes to most of them rather than a reason to be perturbed.
Rogan said that the Harris campaign would only do his podcast if he travelled to her and limited the conversation to an hour. She did make an appearance on Call Her Daddy, the second most popular podcast, where a conversation about her upbringing, abortion rights, housing costs, and JD Vance’s attack on “childless cat ladies” produced headlines.
Harris also appeared on podcasts hosted by former NFL player Shannon Sharpe and the social scientist Brené Brown, but her campaign still relied heavily on traditional broadcast appearances and interviews with titles like Vogue.
Trump’s advisor, Jason Miller, explained the ‘podcast populism’ strategy to Politico’s Playbook Deep Dive podcast:
… when you look at the impact of podcasts, YouTube shows and nontraditional media — part of the thing is you’re reaching voters where they’re at. I mean, you have tens of millions of Americans here who, as much as I love it, are never going to click on Politico or turn on the CBS Evening News.
You have millions of Americans who get their news from social media, maybe they get it from podcasts. Also, to the decentralization of media, people are able to more closely lock in on topics and issue areas that appeal to them. And it’s not all the fun shows like former wrestlers or Barstool Sports-type shows. We also do things like Dave Ramsay, who’s the single best consumer finance podcaster in the business and Patrick Bet-David, who has the single best entrepreneur-based podcast of anyone in podcast media. In late October, Vogue trumpeted Harris’ “viral success” in an interview with her deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, and “the 25-year-old phenom running the @KamalaHQ TikTok account”, Lauren Kapp:
The Harris campaign is relentless because it has to be. Posting anywhere from six to 25 times a day, the team works full-time to stay on top of the internet’s breakneck pace. Trends drive engagement—but you have to embrace them early. “My goal is to always list and post the video under a TikTok audio before it hits around 150,000 videos,” says Kapp, “because at that point it’s kind of oversaturated.” Remember, Flaherty says, that the average voter watches eight hours of content per day.But while the Harris campaign was spending billions on social media and TV ads, the Trump operation was boosting their more traditional media costs with millions upon millions of views gained for free by appearing on such a broad range of podcasts. A study from the Pew Research Centre, published in September, suggested that 54 per cent of Americans get at least some of their news from social media. Trump’s campaign capitalised on that far more effectively.
Trump’s podcast appearances were effectively force-multiplied by the huge number of accounts that take clips from shows and repost them. While the same can be said to some extent for interviews on traditional broadcast channels, they don’t spread nearly as far. Where being quizzed by journalists is generally combative, Trump’s podcast appearances were far more transactional with hosts clearly grateful for the boost in numbers he brought with him.
I’m not arguing that a presidential campaign that largely avoided proper journalistic scrutiny is a good thing but the Democrats used an old playbook. Endorsements from celebrities at rallies, cameos on SNL, and indulgent interviews with glossy magazines don’t reach the kind of numbers they once would have. Trump’s podcast push put him in front of groups of potential voters who would never have engaged with more mainstream political coverage and he was more at home there.
The mainstream media’s failure in this US presidential election is a structural one that has been going on for years now. It’s a fundamental problem with the product. Where broadcasters and publishers could once rely on audiences coming to them, they’ve now got to go out and recapture the attention that has been nabbed by so many niche operations. Despite his $250 million deal with Spotify, Joe Rogan’s podcast is still just a man in a room with some cameras talking. That his influence outweighs newspapers and broadcasters that dominated for decade after decade is an indictment of a slow collapse that they’ve been discussing for years but are nowhere near solving.
Please share this edition if you enjoyed it. It helps.
You can also follow me on Twitter, Threads, and BlueSky.
If you haven’t yet, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.
It helps and allows me to spend more money on research and reporting (of which more is coming).
Buy a t-shirt if you’d like to make a one-off contribution and get a t-shirt.
Despite the confident hot takes spilling out of every corner of the internet, I think there are a multitude of reasons Trump won this week. However, I think it is undeniable that information bubbles and the right wing messaging machine played a significant role. There is no one out there more studied or more incisive on how the (dirty) system works than you. I hope you'll keep making some time to write about the US situation. I find it personally quite helpful as I try to make my corner of the frustratingly purple state of Michigan a little bit better.