Joe Rogan, the podcaster who helped propel Donald Trump back into the White House, just compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Nazi Germany’s secret police.
“Are we really going to be the Gestapo? ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?” Rogan said on Tuesday’s episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” according to NBC News.
WHAT’S GOING ON: Rogan, whose podcast has more than 20.6 million YouTube subscribers and consistently tops Spotify’s charts, endorsed Trump just days after hosting him for a three-hour interview before the 2024 election. Now he’s openly breaking with the administration he helped create.
During a conversation with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Rogan said while “most people” support arresting criminals, many of those same people believe ICE is “operating illegally.”
“I can also see the point of view of the people that say, ‘Yeah, but you don’t want militarized people in the streets just roaming around snatching people up, many of which turn out to actually be U.S. citizens that just don’t have their papers on them,'” Rogan said.
THE DETAILS: Rogan also slammed last week’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Good was trying to run the agent over—Noem called it “an act of domestic terrorism”—but videos and eyewitnesses have contradicted that narrative.
“It just looked horrific to me,” Rogan said. “I mean, when people are saying it’s justifiable because the car hit him, it seemed like she was kind of turning the car away.”
He added: “It’s very ugly to watch someone shoot a U.S. citizen, especially a woman, in the face.”
ZOOM OUT: Rogan isn’t alone. The circle of comedian-podcasters Trump courted during his campaign is turning on him in spectacular fashion.
Andrew Schulz, host of “Flagrant,” who interviewed Trump before the election, now says he feels duped. “Everything he campaigned on, I believed he wanted to do,” Schulz said in July. “And now he’s doing the exact opposite thing of every single f—–g thing. … I voted for none of this.”
Theo Von, who attended Trump’s inauguration and declared his support for the president, publicly demanded the DHS take down a video that used his likeness to promote deportations. “When it comes to immigration my thoughts and heart are a lot more nuanced than this video allows,” Von wrote on X.
Rogan himself has been increasingly vocal, previously calling ICE deportations “f—ing crazy” and saying he “really thought they were just going to go after the criminals.”
WHY IT MATTERS: Focus groups of young Trump voters observed by NBC News found that podcasters like Rogan helped persuade them to vote for Trump in 2024. These aren’t CNN anchors or New York Times columnists—they’re the voices that actually reach millions of young, often politically disengaged Americans.
When Joe Rogan compares ICE to the Gestapo, that’s not just a podcast moment. It’s a signal that the coalition Trump built through bro-culture media is fracturing—and the people who sold him to their audiences are now telling those same audiences they got played.