Joe Rogan is ringing alarm bells about the “very damaging” precedent that President Donald Trump’s second administration is setting.
In his conversation with Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas on Wednesday, Rogan, 58, who previously endorsed Trump, 79, raised concerns that the president’s rampant deployment of ICE has created a “slippery slope” for future presidents.
Despite his appreciation of Trump’s non-elitist attitude, Eszterhas, 81, said he has “a lot of questions in certain areas” of Trump’s actions, including ICE and the ongoing White House ballroom construction.
“The ballroom doesn’t bother me that much. That’s, to me, trivial construction, like whatever,” Rogan said, adding, “The ICE stuff—what bothers me is we’re opening the door for militarized police on our city streets.”
“My perspective is not that you don’t need to get the criminals out. It’s that it is a very slippery slope,” Rogan explained.
In May, PunchUp, the Daily Beast’s investigations Substack, revealed that ICE more than doubled its daily arrest rate as soon as Trump took office for the second time, according to a government dataset. The same dataset revealed that the immigration officers detained a record number of cancer patients, pregnant women, and disabled individuals.
Rogan said many of ICE’s problems stem from their improper training.
Just months before ICE agents killed two citizens in Minnesota in January, Trump slashed required federal law enforcement training to just 47 days—half of what it had previously been—in honor of him being the 47th president.
“They’re not trained for very long. They’re trained for much less time than police officers, much less time than military,” Rogan noted. “And then you have this militarized police force that has no identification, and they’re on the streets. That’s a precedent that you might like when it’s for a cause that you support, but that could easily be for a cause that you do not support.”
Rogan said that ICE could be deployed for any multitude of reasons Trump supporters might not appreciate, like “going door to door and confiscating guns.”
“You could find other ways where a different ruler could use this precedent in a very damaging way for our free society,“ he concluded. ”That’s my perspective on it."
Rogan, who first raised an eyebrow at ICE in August, harshly condemned Trump in January, following the president’s deployment of ICE in Minneapolis, likening the officers to Adolf Hitler’s “Gestapo.”
Eszterhas noted that though he disliked Trump’s ICE goons labeling Renée Good and Alex Pretti as “domestic terrorists,” he had to “give credit to Trump” for removing Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino.
Rogan laughed that Bovino, 56, “wore outfits that were reminiscent of Nazi Germany,” though noting he wasn’t accusing him of anything.
“He had this very weird coat that he would wear all the time,” Rogan said. “And a lot of people were saying this is a very odd choice for someone to be wearing who’s being accused of fascism.”
“How do you get all the criminals out? I don’t know. I’m not the guy. I’m not the one,” Rogan said. “But I am very concerned with this dangerous precedent.”
“You would think that we would learn, but we go through cycles where we learn, we get better, and then we repeat the same things again,“ he declared. ”It’s like we learn for a little while and then we forget.”
“Politicians are like diapers, and they should be changed often and for the same reason,” Eszterhas said, misquoting a statement often misattributed to Mark Twain.
