ON THE SPOT

Joe Rogan Cornered by Oscar Winner on Break With Trump

Michael Douglas asked Rogan point blank where he stands with the president after endorsing him in 2024.

Michael Douglas is putting Joe Rogan on the spot about his complicated relationship with Donald Trump.

The Oscar-winning actor appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience on Wednesday, where he pointedly asked the host how he feels about Donald Trump “now.”

Rogan endorsed Trump in 2024, but after breaking with the president on key issues since Trump’s win, he spent several minutes ranting against the flagship policies of his second term. He has yet to say definitively whether he regrets his vote.

“If you want me to support all these terrible f---ing ideas just because I would be a good person and I’d be a Democrat, like no, it doesn’t make any sense,” Rogan argued at one point, referring to the abolishing of cash bail policies, COVID vaccine mandates, and protest calls to “defund” the police. “That’s how I felt.”

Douglas, 82, in an attempt to clarify the host’s stance, replied, “I know that’s how you felt. What I’m curious about is, how do you feel now?”

From there, Rogan laid out his grievances with Trump’s administration since he took office the second time.

“What Trump stood for, some of it turned out to not be real,” Rogan said. “Like one of them was the ‘No wars.’ Well, look, we’re at war with Iran, so that wasn’t real. The other thing was closing the border. That is real. But then with that, then you have ICE... It’s nuts to just give someone a $50,000 signing bonus. You train them for seven weeks and then give them guns, and you have a militarized force running through the f---ing city streets and put a mask on your face.”

He added, “You’re setting a precedent if you allow a militarized police force with no identification, with masks on, to enter into cities; of course, people are going to say this is an overstep. Of course it seems crazy.”

Douglas has been clearer about his thoughts on Trump. “Right now, our country is flirting with autocracy,” he told IndieWire last July. “Let’s just say that our president’s name has been mentioned enough,” he added. “The news speaks for itself. I am worried, I am nervous. And I just think it’s about the responsibility not for someone else to look out for us but for us to look out for each other.”

The actor, who’s promoting his memoir One Helluva Ride, also asked Rogan how he reconciles having supported both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

“You’re always going to be able to find people that will propose an argument—whether someone has instructed them to do this or whether this is how they actually feel, or whether they just like to argue and get on television and be the contrarian,” Rogan replied.

He insisted that his support for Trump was mostly based on his campaign promise to keep the U.S. out of war. “I think the majority of the United States felt like one of the things that we were voting for when we voted for Trump is no more wars,” Rogan added, calling the ongoing Iran war a “giant quagmire.”

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Eboni Boykin-PattersonEntertainment Reporter

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