JUMPING SHIP

Young Men Are Abandoning the ‘Pod Bros’ Who Got Trump Elected

Approval ratings for the podcasters who helped thrust Donald Trump back into the White House are suffering a fate similar to the president’s.

Podcasters who peddled and laundered Donald Trump to victory in 2024 are hemorrhaging their one-time biggest fans: Young men.

Trump took to podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience and This Past Weekend with Theo Von to boost his numbers among economically disaffected young white voters, while Kamala Harris failed to gain ground with them. But amid his tumultuous term, Trump has had a contagious effect on most of the figures who propelled him back to the top.

Puck has revealed that individuals in the right-wing media sphere, including Tucker Carlson, Andrew Tate, and Joe Rogan, have all experienced double-digit drops in approval ratings since publicly backing Trump in 2024.

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War with Iran marked a turning point for the young men who helped to carry Trump to victory, devastating the economy and breaking key policy promises that distinguished it from the Harris campaign, a polling expert told Puck.

After feeling the blow of Trump’s newfound unpopularity, nearly all of the so-called Pod Bros have attempted to make like the voters and distance themselves from Trump.

Carlson, who interviewed and endorsed Trump on the campaign trail after Fox News fired him in 2023, has seen his favorability among young men drop 12 points in the last year. Carlson began walking back his role in getting Trump elected immediately after Trump launched a war with Iran.

“I do think it’s like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences,” Carlson said. “We’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”

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Rogan, who has tried to bill himself as an independent “free-thinker” despite latching hard onto Trump in 2024, has also seemingly wised up.

“What Trump stood for, some of it turned out to not be real,” Rogan said during a podcast with actor Michael Douglas this month. “Like one of them was ‘No wars’... That wasn’t real.”

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Rogan rejects the idea that Democrats were any better, but has had little positive to say about the current White House. Young men, who make up a majority of Rogan’s audience, approve of the Podcaster 11 points less than when Trump was elected.

Young men who hoped to see less “wokeness” and scold culture in 2024 are now more likely to favor figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Zohran Mamdani, according to Puck’s reporting.

During an April episode of his podcast, Theo Von illustrated what young men may be feeling ahead of the midterm elections.

“Besides the war, the industrial war complex, what American... what guy who’s trying to take care of his family or a single mother who’s a nurse who’s going to work and has to get home and get to her kid’s ballgame... What farmer is this helping? What regular person is this helping? I just don’t know. I don’t understand.”

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Christopher Buchanan

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