Bulwark Takes - Joe Rogan Says Trump “Betrayed” His Base Over Iran War

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

Sam Stein and Tim Miller give their takes on Joe Rogan’s surprisingly blunt reaction to Donald Trump’s war with Iran. Rogan says many supporters feel “betrayed” after Trump campaigned on ending “stupid wars,” only to launch major strikes that have now killed U.S. troops and raised fears of wider conflict. Sam and Tim dig into Rogan’s political evolution and why this moment is so uncomfortable for the MAGA-friendly podcast world. After years of embracing Trump as the anti-war outsider, figures in the “podcast bro” ecosystem are now confronting the possibility that they misjudged him.

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please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everyone. It's me, Sam Stein, managing out of the Bullock, joined by Tim Miller. What is your even title? Our founder, extraordinaire. I was out of founder. Came in late on the host of the board podcast.

commentator talent, takes man? Takesman is a good one. Okay, let's go to takes man. I consider you a founder. Anyways, we're here to talk about Joe Rogan, the Iran War, and whether or not this actually signals something bigger, I know there's been a lot of talk about what, like, Magan, if they're like support of the war and whatever.

We're going to get into all that on this bulwark takes. Appreciate your subscription to our channel. So Tim, today Rogan's going on as pod. You know, it's a multiple hour affair. But a couple clips that surface, which we're interested, And I guess somewhat expected, considering how he's felt about the stuff in the past, where he finally addresses what's happening in Iran. Let's play the 15-second clip, because I think that one is more interesting where he talks about the feeling of betrayal that folks have over what is happening in Iran. But just seems so insane based on what he ran on.

I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? And he ran on no more wars and these stupid senseless wars. and then we have one that we can't even really clearly define why we did it. All right. How many times can this man feel betrayed? I feel like this is like the six or seventh betrayal that Joe Rogan has endured over Donald Trump. And at some point, I feel like Joe Rogan should just do an hour podcast where he just talks to himself in the mirror about like what happened.

I think he's processing. And just in the spirit of radical candor, I've not consumed. the two to three hour Joe Rogan interview with Michael Schellenberger, and I do not intend to. But I did talk to our guy, Brandon, who watched a lot of it. Just so I had a greater, fuller picture beyond what was happening in these little clips. And one of the things that Brendan said to me was that it was kind of testy. The interview was kind of testy because Schellenberger, if you don't know him, he's kind of a Rogan-esque figure, but in the like policy space. He was like a lefty environmentalist type that like became big contrarian around COVID and around

woke stuff. And so he kind of went down that same pipeline. He's a free presser. Yeah, in the policy space, right? And it was interesting that Schellenberger remains like pretty defensive of Trump across all of these metrics because he, Schellenberger feels betrayed by the left, fairly or unfairly. And so it's interesting that like that dynamic was such. that I would make Groken testing.

And I think that's telling about this cognitive dissonance that you're talking about, Sam, where he's like, wait a minute, like at some level, say what you want about Joe Rogan. I think he at least had convinced himself that he was not being a hack, that he was on a authentic ideological journey, you know, from being a Bernie curious, cultural conservative bro dude to being, you know, like MAGA friendly, because they had common agreements on a few things. And among the top, top thing on that list was not going into stupid Middle East wars.

Right. And, you know, and so you can imagine how somebody who really care, who that is something that they see as a defining issue of themselves, with their own ideology. You could see how that person could go from being for Obama, being anti-Iraq war,

to being Bernie curious, to all of a sudden saying, like, look, this bipartisan establishment keeps taking us into fucking stupid war. and here's this outsider guy who doesn't. And, you know, like, you can at least see how he could self-conceive as like, this was a rational trajectory for me. And now he has to sit in the stew of the fact that that bet was wrong and that he got duped

and he got fooled by Trump. And you can see how that might make him testy. And you can see why that would have him leaning into like this notion of betrayal where it was not him that misjudged Trump. It was Trump that is. that is betraying his people. I suppose. I also think the other thing here is,

like, okay, there are three real main issues here that have been the source of betrayal for Rogan. There's this one. There's the Epstein Files, which was another animating issue for a lot of these folks. Like, they had to get to the bottom

of the Epstein files, and Trump was going to get to the bottom of the Epstein files. I mean, they promised to get to the bottom of the Epstein Files. The other one is immigration, where, you know, they, I don't know,

deluded themselves, convinced themselves, whatever you want to say, that Trump would just go after the bad guys, and then we're going to have immigration rates across the country, and people were being hysterical. I think this is what probably gets them. I have no idea. I would love to know, but like, during 2004, a lot of the pushback against the Rogan types were, no, you're wrong. Like, Trump obviously is going to do mass deportations. He's cavalier on foreign policy. He'll probably get us into some sort of ridiculous dick measuring contest with someone. He's not going to solve these wars and like good luck with the Epstein files he probably ain't going to happen right and so i think some of the testiness is that he has to or he should admit like yeah my detractors the people who were

telling me that i was being kind of naive and stupid about this stuff were right and that's really hard to do right you don't want to tell you don't want to admit that the people who were like yelling at you and go to black pill space what is black what is black what is black bill space nihilism you go to face where it's just like look i was not but i i was not but i I did not show misjudgment wrong. I was betrayed. And I'm going to continue to be betrayed because no matter who you put in there, whether it's Republicans or Democrats or populace or not,

like there's some deep state borg out there that is going to make them all do this stuff. And I think that that's what this has headed. I think that that's what a lot of these guys are going to convince themselves of. And they're going to become nihilistic and jaded. and want to check out of the political system. And I'm going to tell you, the political system might have been better off when they were checked out in the first place. And so I don't know that that's bad. I don't think that we should necessarily see that as bad.

Some people, you know, my boy, Theo Vaughn, like some people weren't meant for politics. You know? Right. Theo, Theo, Von, like, we've done this before. He crushed it interviewing the Amish kid. That's great. That's funny. It's like, you know, Theo asking some Amish.

Jewish kid like, hey, have you ever played Nintendo? That's good. That's good material. You know, talking to the vice president, not as strong. And it seems like these guys instincts, it doesn't seem like. It's pretty clear these guys radar antenna was way off when it comes to MAGA. And I would love for them to see the light and see that it was the MAGA people in particular that betrayed them. But I think more likely is that they kind of start to go back to their world of non paying attention. I was just an addendum on Theo. Because, yes, I think you're right. And yet, at the same time when he has Bobby Kennedy Jr. on talking about snorting lines of coke off a toilet.

See, like, I kind of like that content, too. Good content. Yeah. You know, I talked to Will Sumner a bit about a lot about this, I should say, about, like, sort of the people who get sucked into conspiracies. Because it was especially true on the Epstein stuff where, like, everyone was waiting for this great reveal. And then it didn't come because Trump was just not allowing the documents to be released. And so I remember I was like, Will, how do they sort of rationalize this stuff, right? Like they put all their hopes in Trump doing this and then he didn't do it.

Like, aren't they mad at Trump? And he said exactly what you said, which is that they just concoct a larger conspiracy. Like Trump is actually like a bit player in this. Like the real forces are even bigger than Trump and they're controlling Trump. And like it's not his fault. And I guess in the Iran stuff, I know we're not playing the clip. This is where your people come back in Israel. Yeah, it's all, it comes back to the Jews.

But in the Iran stuff, like there's this new line out there. It's like, well, Lindsey Graham, you know, he's just influencing Donald Trump. And like, he's got way too much influence. And we just got to get Lindsey Graham out of there. It's like, you know, Donald Trump is the president. You know, he can do what he wants. If he's getting influenced this easily by Lindsey fucking Graham, then maybe you should rethink your priors about Donald Trump, right?

Yeah. That is true. And they're not going to do it. Here, let's take it out of politics. David from, I'm stealing this from David from, but he's good on this. It always resonated with me.

He said, God, he must have said this on our podcast seven years ago, because, you know, time is a flat circle and we're all, you know, living the same thing over and over again.

I was still living in California, because I can remember listening to this, being in California, being like, oh, yeah, that's right. And he's like, imagine somebody in your life that gets scammed by,

you know, they, they purchased the condo in the Everglades, or they're, friend comes to them with an investment idea and they put a bunch of money and maybe a little more than they can afford and and things start to go bad and you go up to them as your friend and you say, hey, bro, like, you got scammed by this guy. Like, you got like, what is their reaction going to be? Nine times out of 10, there's some people who are bigger than this, but nine times out of 10,

the person's going to be mad at you for calling them out for the scam, right? They're not going to, you know, they're going to think about how there's some other factor at play and like, whatever, fuck you for judging me. You know what I mean? And I think that that human instinct to not want to like look inside and accept that somebody pulled one over on you.

I think that's what we're seeing with Joe Rogan. There was a famous story and I wish I had it in front of me about this professor like an academic, smart guy obviously. He was a college professor who fell for one of these Nigerian print scams. Do you remember this story? No, you don't remember the story? and he lost all his money.

And even though he had been presented evidence that he had been scammed and lost all this money, he continued to believe that the scammer was real. Like he could not get around the idea that this person was just like some, you know, jackass on the other side of the internet telling him to like give up his... He thought he was a prince.

Yeah, or yeah, something like that. He's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This person really is in a heap of trouble. and I have to help. So I think there's something to it. Back to the war itself. So let's play the other clip of Rogan warning about World War III. And then I have some thoughts at the flip side of that. The whole situation internationally has been so tense already with what's going on in Gaza, with what's going on in Ukraine. It's like, and to add this to the pile, it's like, I mean, it genuinely feels like there's a real possibility that we might be entering World War III.

Okay, so I don't know if we're entering World War III. I happen to think we're not. But I do think there's something to the other elements of what he's talking about, which is the sense of just things completely out of control. I have my theory of politics. I've said it a million times probably to you two, where it's like all elections to me are sort of reactions to the last elections. And I think that's why Biden won in 2020, honestly,

because people are just like, this is just too much. COVID, all this shit, the economy fucking sucking, Trump and all this chaos. like let's just get the old steady man in there. And I think people like Rogan look at this and like, ah, geez, like oil's going up, boys going down, jobs are going down, Trump's acting crazy. We have all these flashpoints across the globe.

And I think there is a constituency out there that's just like, I want off this ride. I want normalcy. I don't want to think about politics every waking minute. And I get, I think that's underrated a little bit when we have our discussion. People are just tired of it. I have two reactions that. I want to come back to World War.

three. So don't let us talk about that. But to this, I think it's underappreciated how much people felt that way under Biden. And I think that some viewers of this will feel like that's unfair and that's fine. But I think that there were a lot of voters that had the sense that inflation was out of control. Rogan just laid out. Ukraine was happening. Gaza was happening. And we've got this old guy who, whatever, God love him. He might be well intended, but he's lost a step, and he's asleep at the switch, and things are spiraling. And I happen to think that's unfair because I think that just, especially in America, like, we have this strange perception

of the president as like an omnipotent, unniscient being that can fix every world problem. And like, sometimes it ain't about us. Like, I don't really think that Ukraine or Gaza was really about us. Like, could he have handled those things a little better? Sure. But, like, the fact that they happened, I don't think was because of old man Biden was in there. I think what happened anyway. But from a voter standpoint, you look at the world and you think, man, shit, like things really expensive. I can't community crime is up a little bit. It's starting to come down in the end. But you know what I mean? Like around the world, things are out of control. And I think that they looked back at Trump 19 pre-COVID. And they're like, things were calmer back then. Like, Trump was crazy. Like, it's weird. Like, we all know that Trump's insane. But like, I think a lot of voters looked at it was like Trump was crazy. And there were tweets and weird shit happening. But like generally things were

calmer. And I do think that hurt Biden and then Harris eventually a lot. And I do think that that is hurting Trump now. I think that people have like a goldfish element of element. Here's a thought exercise. I thought about this a fair bit actually over the weekend. Let's say this was happening right now under Biden or Harris. And it's 2023. Okay. Yep. I'm talking about Iran. How would Donald Trump be reacting to this? What would he be saying? They're stupid. They don't know how to handle this. This would never have started. It wasn't for me. You know what I mean? Like there's no... He would have been like, I would have had this negotiated.

It would have been settled. Why are we putting U.S. troops in harm's way? He can't cut a deal. You know, he would have done exactly that. He would have absolutely... I cut the perfect deal. And we wouldn't be in that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, sure. I think people don't appreciate that that was Trump's M.O.

I could settle this shit, this chaos before it ever gets to chaos. And now he can't make that case, right? Like, he's causing the chaos. So it was reported today. White House basically confirmed it. About 140 U.S. service members have been injured in this war with Iran. That includes eight who are seriously injured. That's not including the seven who have died. We also get word today that the administration says it's used $5.6 billion in munitions during the first two days of strikes in Iran. Then you have the stuff of reports that the Iranians are potentially putting mines in the straight-to-form moves and Trump's saying, well, I'm going to just blow them to smithereens if they do that. You have Chris Wright, the energy secretary, tweeting that the straight's open, then deleting the tweet and the oil spiking and going back and forth. It's just, it's chaos. It's like pure chaos right now, which I guess leads back to your point about World War III. What's the point you want to make? It's chaos and is lying, too. Just

one more thing on the lie. I'm covering up, you know, they weren't, they've been non-candid with us about the other injuries and other things that have been happening that they've been trying to right uh push that stuff under the rug um the point i wanted to make world world war three i also don't think that that this is world war three i don't think it's a zero percent chance i guess i would say um i i think it's a extremely low chance but i i i don't so i don't think it's going to happen but you know the butterfly flap its wings thing is real like sometimes it ain't in your control like there are other counterparties out there you know and if i can iran decides to get crazy or trying to start like who the hell knows right what could happen i i think sometimes you know i don't think that

when Franz Ferdinand was killed, people thought that we're going to end up in World War I. So sometimes these things are not predictable. But I don't think we're going to World War III. It was satisfying to hear Joe Rogan say that, though, because so many of these guys, the amateur pro podcasters, as well as the amateurish podcasters,

as well as like the isolationist Republican types, the MAGA America First, the JD-Vants types, those Republicans, during that period with Biden, for 22, 23, 24. They were throwing the shit around all the time. And like Biden was,

honestly, if you just look back at it with, with 2020 vision of being a look back in the past, Biden should have given Ukraine more weapons, right? Because Ukraine was much more able to defend itself than anybody thought. And potentially, like Russia could have been stopped earlier. And the U.S. didn't want to give them offensive weapons. We don't really know.

We're not 100% sure. Who knows? You can't counterfactual. who the hell knows what could have happened. But I think that, but the America first right wingers and the podcast bros were out there being like, Biden's really risking, risk in nuclear war here. How could be helping Ukraine at all? Like, we should just be letting Russia have Ukraine because World War III could be imminent.

World War III could be any day. We never got in a fucking, we were never sniffed World War III during the Biden administration. And then right now, like, while we aren't on the brink of World War III by any means, we're certainly, I would say, a step closer than we were when Biden was providing defensive weapons to Ukraine after they got invaded by Russia. And so it's nice, it's nice is that there's at least somebody out there who is peddling that shit in 2022. He's also paddling it now. I like that. I appreciate that consistency. I think your boy, David Sachs, was the one who always was tweeting about World War III. He has not said jack shit about what's happening in Iran,

I guess, because he's cryptos. There's a really good tweet. Somebody said, the other day, which is it's sad David Sacks has passed away. No. It's sad that David Sacks has passed away because he would have so much to say about this war right now. I know. I thought David Sacks was a poster at heart, but apparently not. He lost his touch. What the fuck, Dave? Hasn't posted. That's a retweet. Let's find the last original. People don't know David Sacks was an all-in podcast. He's a VC bro. Went pro-Trump. Is in the administration now as Trump's still podcasting. his last tweet that he sent himself not a retweet was March 4. Come on.

Six days? Six days ago. Not a lot to say from him lately. JD's also been pretty quiet on the Twitter. Yeah, he has. JD has been, I saw some of JD spokespeople doing the thing that I used to do when I didn't want my candidate to go out and talk about something,

which was, what are you talking about? You know, what are you guys talking about? He did that. He went to that coffee shop this morning and he did this friendly interview over here. Like, what do you mean? He's not been out there answering questions about his gaff on the Iraq war. No. J.D. has not sent, he sent one tweet yesterday.

He was supposed to do a town hall. Yeah. He canceled his town hall. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Okay. Well, we're waiting.

All right, buddy. Good to speak to you. Always a pleasure. Thank you for founding the bulwark. Not quite. Might as well. wouldn't have happened without me. So I'm kind of. Everyone subscribe to the feed. Love you all. Talk to you later.