Happy July 4th, you fools
Americans elected Donald Trump again. They are about to really find out what that means
Joe Rogan had about as much influence as any media member in returning Donald Trump to the White House. The host of one of the world’s most popular podcasts, Rogan spends a lot of his time giving credence to conspiracy theories and lending his platform to cranks to espouse those theories.
He also gave his blessing to MAGA figures like Elon Musk and RFK Jr, and endorsed Trump himself after giving him one of his trademark non-challenging interviews during the election campaign.
And now Rogan has some regrets.
On his podcast this week, he called Trump’s deportation strategy, which has included roving gangs of masked ICE agents plucking civilians off the street, “insane.”
If Trump and his people had said during the election campaign, Rogan argued, “‘We’re going to go to Home Depot and we’re going to arrest all of the people at Home Depot, we’re going to construction sites and we’re just going to, like, tackle people at construction sites,’ I don’t think anybody would have signed up for that.”
Oh? Perhaps Rogan and his fellow Trump voters were unaware that his promise of MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW — he literally had signs to that effect at his rallies — would mean, in fact, mass deportations now. How else was Trump ever going to achieve that goal than by sweeping up migrants who had been living and working in the United States peacefully? Some Trump supporters probably told themselves that ICE would target criminals, but think about that for a second: if it was just a matter of identifying and apprehending people who break the law, there are already police forces for that. The whole point of ICE’s goon squads is that they snatch people who might have entered the country illegally. (And in many cases, didn’t even do that.)
And now, with the budget bill that becomes official today, Trump’s ICE efforts are about to explode, with something like $100-billion added to the agency’s budget to build detention facilities and vastly expand the goon squads. Instead of Republicans being alarmed at Trump’s ICE policies, where students can be targeted for writing an op-ed in the campus paper, they have instead given him the money to supercharge those same policies.
Rogan is a host of UFC broadcasts. The sport has many fighters from Latin America and is popular with immigrants from those countries. How long until ICE agents descend on a UFC event and start rounding up fans? (Just this week, they arrested the boxer Julio Caesar Chavez, Jr., days after he headlined a pay-per-view event with Jake Paul.)
Rogan’s pushback, such as it is, follows a pattern that is common in Trump 2.0: puzzlement at the fact that Trump is doing what he said he would do. You see it with the people who are surprised that the mass government layoffs spearheaded by Elon Musk’s DOGE mean that some of their hard-working friends and neighbours lose their jobs. You see it with the Trump-supporting small-business owners who are shocked to discover that punitive tariffs on overseas suppliers mean their input costs are much higher. You see it with the tourism officials in Trump-voting states who lament that visitors don’t want to come anymore. Fuck around and find out, fellas.
It will almost certainly all get much worse. The land of the free has embraced authoritarianism, and the scary thing is that so many Americans don’t even seem to realize it.
Other, less depressing, stuff
The good folks over at The Line are running a series this week called Minor Irritants. It’s pretty self explanatory. My contribution: self-checkouts.
Mitch, please
The end of the Marner era in Toronto came with a whimper, not a bang. But, for theScore, I wrote about how it’s kind of wild that Team Run It Back ended like this.
Are the Blue Jays … good?
My other piece for theScore this week is on your Toronto Blue Jays. If nothing else, they are fun again, which is a stark departure from the way things were looking in April. Might as well enjoy it, I say.