Donald Trump, the 45th and soon to be 47th president of the United States, is a talker — a relentless one, a stubborn one, often a cruel one, sometimes a droll one. The dominant sound and strategy of the biggest American political upheavals of the last decade may well be his always-on faucet of speech.
So it’s noteworthy when someone accustomed to dominating communication encounters another person who is able to set the conversational rhythm and tone.
This was the scenario a few weeks ago during his appearance on Theo Von’s podcast, “This Past Weekend.” Von, a former reality-television personality and a popular comedian, is an earnestly naïve conversationalist whose chats are nonlinear, sometimes provocative, very often funny and rhythmically all over the place. He wasn’t attempting to unsettle the former president, but somehow, zigzagging through topics, that’s what happened. He asked Trump about his children and their relationship with Trump’s father. He noted that the audio quality of Trump’s X conversation with Elon Musk wasn’t very good.
Most importantly, Von spoke candidly about his own battles with addiction — “Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie,” instantly entered the political-interview hall of fame. That line of conversation seemed to soften Trump, who doesn’t drink or use drugs, and whose older brother, Fred, struggled with alcoholism. Often Trump seemed as if he were watching Von with a blend of shock and concern. At the end of their hourlong conversation, he left Von with an awkwardly phrased blessing: “Good luck with your situation,” by which he meant Von’s recovery journey. It was almost sweet.
This was one of a number of unusual conversations Trump had in the presidential campaign’s closing weeks, part of a new strategy: Skip most mainstream media and head straight into the manosphere, the loose caucus of podcasters, livestreamers, social media stars and other outlier media figures who have heavily monopolized online discourse lately. In the two months leading up to the election, Trump sat for conversations with at least eight podcasters and streamers — all male, many under 35, notionally politically curious, sometimes puerile and unserious, and sometimes spiteful and scabrous.
Kamala Harris’s campaign was predicated on the dominance and continuance of the alleged monoculture — an appearance from Oprah Winfrey, a rally endorsement from Beyoncé, Instagram support from Taylor Swift, twerking from Megan Thee Stallion. It presumed the existence of a coherent cultural tent that the targeted voters already lived under, and presented Harris’s embrace by these stars as an extension of the audience’s pre-existing fandom. Even the pace and tone of @KamalaHQ, the campaign’s rapid-response social media accounts, was heavily drawn from how fan armies function online. (Harris did podcasts, as well — the long-form stalwarts “Call Her Daddy” and “Club Shay Shay” — though they didn’t much alter her narrative.)
Trump, denied access to this monoculture, took an approach that was both fragmentary and more modern — and in many ways more attuned to the rhythm of a young person’s media diet. He leaned into the evanescent, the niche, the lightly scandalous. That meant the long-running “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, as well as Von’s “This Past Weekend” and Andrew Schulz’s “Flagrant”; a couple of turns with the prankster-chatbots the Nelk Boys; banter with athletes on “Bussin’ With the Boys” and Bryson DeChambeau’s “Break 50”; and Adin Ross’s livestream, filmed at Mar-a-Lago.
These shows and their stars have deep sway with hard-to-reach young men, though Trump’s appearances on them are often discussed as political curiosities, not as cultural phenomena. They reflect a shift in what’s likely to be the tone of political conversation moving forward, both online and off. And more crucially, they also afforded an unduplicable opportunity for image renovation to a candidate most often publicly seen in stern grievance mode.
As often as not, the Trump of these shows — which collectively emit the energy of a locker room, taking “Porky’s”-era masculinity out for a spin — didn’t echo the Trump of his endless rallies, or his many Fox News interviews or Truth Social screeds. Policy talk was almost nil. Instead, he was avuncular, sometimes warm, occasionally curious and, in general, at more apparent ease than in almost any other public setting. Sometimes he even seemed a touch embarrassed at the flattery of the hosts, as if he couldn’t quite believe the pool of adoration he’d stumbled into.
The Nelk Boys are the ne plus ultra, and the originators — Trump first came on their podcast, “Full Send,” four years ago. His recent appearance, along with a separate vlog documenting the Nelks’ trip on Trump’s plane, suggested a coterie of freshmen in awe of a senior regaling them with tall tales. It was the most familiar throwback to the first Trump campaign, in which late-night shows welcomed him, and Jimmy Fallon lovingly tousled his hair.
Of all the recent fusillade of Trump conversations, Von’s — filmed at Trump’s Bedminster golf club — was by far the most thoughtful and revealing. Von isn’t cowed by fame or authority, and he’s almost skittishly attuned to the contours of his own curiosity, making for talks that travel in jagged fashion and demand alertness. (The podcaster’s recent interviews with Bernie Sanders and JD Vance show him to be an equal-opportunity inquisitor.) Even Rogan, who is a dogged questioner, struggled with Trump’s roundaboutness. At times, that hemming and hawing — “the weave,” as Trump describes it — became the topic of conversation itself. Will Compton, of “Bussin’,” acknowledged Trump’s circuitousness and tried to get him back on topic, with limited success. Schulz and his sidekick Akaash Singh were the most pointed about asking Trump to answer specific questions, though at one point, after minutes of filibustering, Schulz shrugged, “I don’t even want to know the answer now.”
Interlocutors like the Nelks and Ross are opportunistic and, politically at least, not terribly curious. Ross’s stream was the most egregious in this regard — when Trump senses a friendly room, he leans into his stump issues like a micro rally.
Aesthetically, “Flagrant” is the most professional of these outfits, shifting between talk show and parody of a talk show. Its camerawork toggles between a standard talking-head shot and one much more up-close and almost uncanny, “Adult Swim”-style. Schulz attempted a similar balance with his questions, both working blue (making a raw joke about Trump’s son Barron and the overturning of Roe v. Wade) and also making a semi-earnest attempt to engage Trump on the Abraham Accords.
What do these shows have in common? They are long, an hour or two or three, and only use a handful of camera angles held for lengthy stretches of time, which makes them draining — easier as background viewing. Ads are inserted automatically by YouTube, often in the middle of conversations, disrupting the flow.
Apart from “Flagrant,” they have rudimentary set design, often with product placement beverages and snacks on the tables. (Wash down your Bored Jerky with some Ryl iced tea, anyone?) The chairs are unpresidential in myriad ways — on “Full Send,” Trump sat in one twice as wide as his body; on “This Past Weekend,” it was almost comically narrow. The conversational decorum was even more lax: There were crass jokes about Harris, particularly with the Nelk Boys. And the hosts feel comfortable enough to refer to Trump ultra-casually: Von called him Donald, Compton of “Bussin’” referred to him as Don.
Some of these podcasters even use Trump as a kind of plaything — Ross pressed him to do his signature herky-jerky celebration dance after giving him a Tesla Cybertruck as a gift; the Nelk Boys hitched a ride on Trump Force One and mused about “taking down a flight attendant.” DeChambeau took this approach the most literally, and also the most seriously, playing a round of golf with Trump. Trump even landed a few better shots than DeChambeau, the 2024 U.S. Open winner.
Across all of these appearances, Trump often asked questions, revealing the shape of his curiosities, even if they are mostly limited to the metrics of success. He asked Ross about the Nelk Boys (“Are they competitors of yours?”), pressed DeChambeau on technique (“So you putt with your chest essentially? No hands?”) and queried Taylor Lewan, of “Bussin’,” about his physical stature when he played left tackle (“How much heavier were you then? You decided you wanted to live?”). The “Bussin’” episode also includes an extremely rare Trump confession of failing at something: gymnastics. “I was the worst.”
Trump’s entree into this space was smoothed by Dana White, the president and chief executive of the UFC mixed martial arts company, who thanked the podcasters at his brief speech on election night; and also by Trump’s youngest son, Barron, an N.Y.U. freshman who is an apparent fan, according to Trump. “My 6’9” son says hello,” he told Lewan and Compton.
White’s involvement renders plain what is perhaps these shows’ true intent: creating a generation of young men who view politics primarily as lighthearted smack talk. The replacement of decorum and ethics with backslapping and flickers of vulnerability. A clear path to wide-scale public recognition without checks and balances. The sense that if you just hang out long enough, nothing can hurt you.
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