Trump during the taping.
Photo: The Joe Rogan Experience
Two hours and 40 minutes into Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump, the most influential podcaster in America finally asked the former president about at least one of his most frequent obsessions. “One of the things I wanted to talk to you about was the JFK files,” Rogan said, before lightly pressing Trump for a reason why he did not fully release the classified files on the assassination that has captivated many Americans who believe that the government played a role in the murder of John F. Kennedy. Trump said there are some people still alive “who are affected” — to which Rogan suggested that these people were “implicated” in a plot to kill Kennedy. “When there are living people, you generally don’t want to do it,” Trump said.
It appears Rogan himself took this same protect-the-living approach on Friday, to Trump’s benefit, regarding another one of his obsessions: the mysteriously well-connected sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Since Epstein killed himself in 2019 in a Manhattan cell to avoid prosecution for alleged sex trafficking, the top podcaster has returned to the matter over and over again on his show. In a 2020 interview with a former CIA agent, Rogan proposed that Epstein did not kill himself and discussed at length the theory that he was an Israeli intelligence asset tasked with getting leverage over the world’s rich and powerful. In 2022, he told COVID skeptic Alex Berenson how conspiracist Alex Jones told him years before about “an island where they take influential people and they have sex with underage people.” In 2023, Rogan speculated that Epstein’s painting of Bill Clinton in a dress in his Upper East Side mansion was a reminder of his leverage over the former president. He’s riffed on Epstein conspiracies with comedian friends like Shane Gillis, Tim Dillon, and Whitney Cummings. In August, Rogan was not afraid to ask billionaire and former FBI informant Peter Thiel about his scheduled meetings with Epstein in 2014 — six years after the financier went to prison for sex crimes. (Naturally, Thiel disagreed with Rogan’s thoughts on Epstein having “dirt” on the world’s most powerful people.)
But on Friday, he didn’t ask Trump about Epstein once.
Rogan and Trump in studio on Friday.
Photo: Screencap/The Joe Rogan Experience
There was much Rogan could have asked about, such as Trump’s long friendship with Epstein in the 1990s. He did not ask about flying on Epstein’s infamous plane. He did not ask about the (unsubstantiated) claims from Epstein’s alleged victims that Trump had sex with them. He did not ask about the new allegation, this week, from model Stacey Williams, who claimed that Trump groped her in Trump Tower in 1993 as Epstein watched. And he did not ask Trump about his comment in 2002 that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” (Trump has denied wrongdoing in all the above allegations.)
They talked about much else though. Trump was longwinded, rambling but lucid, as he discussed how impressed he was by the Lincoln bedroom in the White House, and how the word “tariff” is “more beautiful than love.” Rogan teed up Trump to bash Harris on her policies in the 2020 Democratic primary and they both discussed their thoughts on wind turbines. (Rogan said that they are “gross” and ugly, while Trump called them “bird cemeteries” and suggested they might making whales suicidal. “I wanna be a whale psychiatrist,” he added.) Trump claimed that Google CEO Sundar Pichai told him that his stunt appearance working at McDonald’s this week was “one of the biggest things we’ve ever had on Google.”
Maybe — like Trump told Rogan — when there are living people, you generally don’t want to ask about it.
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