Joe Rogan: Follow Your Own Advice and 'Shut the F— Up'

I've spent enough years behind a microphone to know the difference between entertainment and a sales pitch dressed up as entertainment, and I know which one this was. Rogan does, too...

It takes a particular kind of hubris to stand on the South Lawn of the White House, on a sitting president’s 80th birthday, calling the fights for a cage match that the president personally dreamed up, hosted, sat ringside for, and bought stock in, and then go on your podcast a day later and tell the rest of the country that anybody who noticed the politics of it all should just:

“Shut the f*ck up!”

But that’s what Joe Rogan said this week, complaining that “so many people are trying to make it a partisan thing” and pleading with everybody to just please settle down and stop. It would be funny if it weren’t such a perfect little distillation of how the whole GOP con works.

There’s nothing accidental or apolitical about erecting a structure taller than the White House itself on the patch of grass where Marine One usually lands, all so two men can choke each other bloody in front of America’s Caligula on the day he happens to turn eighty.

Trump dreamed this thing up while at a rally in Iowa. He invited the fighters to the Oval Office to show off AI renderings of his octagon. He sat in the front row next to Melania and Dana White, surrounded by his whole family, his Cabinet, a clutch of billionaires and Mark Zuckerberg, while Meta blanketed the broadcast with ads.

The corners of the cage carried logos from companies with cozy ties to the administration, including Polymarket, the prediction market that’s drawn scrutiny over insider betting by Trump allies and Donald Trump Jr’s involvement with it.

Dana White is the man who introduced Trump at the 2024 Republican National Convention. And when Trump’s own Justice Department, run by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, went to court to keep the show going, its lawyers actually told a federal judge that anybody who didn’t like it could simply avert their gaze for the weekend.

The American people, it turns out, aren’t fooled the way Rogan hopes they are: only sixteen percent of us think it’s appropriate to hold cage fights on the White House lawn, and even among Republicans it doesn’t crack a third.

Rogan’s defense, that being there “doesn’t mean you endorse foreign policy,” is the kind of thing that sounds reasonable, as long as you don’t think about it.

Nobody is mad that fans watched a fight: people who’re outraged are pointing out that the People’s House was handed over to a private, for-profit company so a narcissistic president could throw himself a birthday party dressed up as a celebration of the nation’s 250th, and it was done on our dime.

And while Rogan was busy lecturing us about how both sides just want so badly to claim a win, he was the one holding the microphone when heavyweight Josh Hokit, who’d spit up on himself at the weigh-in the day before, used a White House stage to declare that “Michelle Obama is a man.”

Rogan smiled and moved on. That’s not nonpartisan: that’s a man who knows exactly what kind of crowd he’s playing to and what kind of administration-wide misogyny, hate, and racism he’s promoting.

There’s an old phrase for governing this way: the Roman poet Juvenal, watching his republic rot into empire, sneered that a people who once handed out commands and legions had shrunk their entire appetite down to two things, panem et circenses, bread and circuses.

The emperors of the then-decaying Roman empire learned that a crowd fed and entertained is a crowd that doesn’t ask where the treasury’s money went. So the Roman oligarchs built the Colosseum and filled it with gladiators and let the mob roar while the republic died around them.

Trump is following that same playbook, whether he knows the source or not. He gave us a blood-splattered cage bolted into the South Lawn, fireworks over the Truman Balcony, and an opening montage that projected Conor McGregor, a man a civil jury found liable for rape, raising his gloves against the Washington Monument.

The monuments to Lincoln and the Founders were turned into backdrops for a beer-can spectacle on which Trump made a pile of money.

His financial disclosures show he bought stock in TKO Group Holdings, the UFC’s parent company, and the stock climbed nearly nine percent in the week after the announcement.

His sons’ Trump Organization teamed up with the UFC to sell commemorative “Trump Coins” running from $249.99 to $11,999.99, with some of the profits reportedly flowing to his licensing company, DTTM Operations LLC.

The White House insists there’s no conflict because his assets sit in a trust, except it’s not a blind trust, it’s run by his own children. As the watchdog group CREW put it, using the White House to promote a company whose stock you just bought is about as bare a conflict of interest as anybody could imagine.

House Oversight Democrats now estimate Trump has pulled in some $2.25 billion in fully realized profits from this kind of self-dealing, in clear violation of both the Constitution, federal law, and ordinary morality.

The man turned the People’s House into an advertising agency with a stock exchange, and Joe Rogan wants you to believe the only inappropriate thing in the picture is the people complaining about it.

Then there are the gold coins the Trump Crime Family is hustling with the cage match. Three-quarters of Americans say the cost of living is their biggest economic worry. Gas prices have jumped roughly fifty percent since Trump dragged us into war with Iran at the end of February.

Thank the “Big Beautiful Bill”: since it’s passage, more than one in three of us have skipped a meal in the past year to save money, food insecurity is back to levels we haven’t seen since the darkest days of the pandemic, ACA premiums are spiking for tens of millions, and the average family paid more than $1,700 in tariff taxes while Trump handed his billionaire friends another tax cut.

Gavin Newsom’s office summed it up perfectly while the cage was still going up, telling the president that what people actually want is “lower gas prices.”

This is Marie Antoinette/Caligula stuff. It’s bread and circuses without the bread, the circus charged to a $60 million taxpayer tab and the sleazy gold coins sold on the way out the door, all while working families switch to cheaper groceries and dig into savings just to keep the lights on.

I’ve spent enough years behind a microphone to know the difference between entertainment and a sales pitch dressed up as entertainment, and I know which one this was.

Rogan does too. That’s why he’s so eager to tell everybody to stop talking about it, because the whole machine runs on us not paying attention, on us treating a rigged spectacle as harmless fun, and a president’s grift as just the price of a good time.

Before the election, whether Joe intended it or not, he used one of the largest and most trusted platforms in America to help normalize and elevate Donald Trump at a moment when the country was deciding whether to return him to power.

Millions of listeners who saw him as an honest broker heard Trump presented in a setting largely free of the rigorous challenge that accompanies traditional journalism.

Between Trump’s attacks on democratic institutions, his use of the DOJ for political retribution, and the damage to America from his presidency, history will remember that Joe wasn’t just an observer of those events. He helped make them possible.

So…Shut the f*ck up, Joe Rogan!

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