Joe Rogan, a popular podcaster, is questioning President Trump’s recent decisions to post plaques in the White House criticizing his predecessors, replace former President Joseph R. Biden’s portrait with an autopen and blame Hollywood director Rob Reiner’s murder on his anti-Trump views.
“It’s all crazy,” Mr. Rogan said on an episode of his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, posted on Christmas.
Mr. Rogan used the word “crazy” to describe Mr. Trump’s actions nearly 20 times in the span of nine minutes.
He endorsed Mr. Trump ahead of the 2024 election but has become more critical of the president as he’s served the first year of his second term.
Mr. Rogan’s latest commentary on Mr. Trump started when his guest, comedian Shane Gillis, asked if he had seen the plaques the president posted under photos of his predecessors in the White House.
Mr. Rogan had heard about the plaques but not seen them, so they pulled up screenshots to read.
“Who’s writing these things?” Mr. Rogan said in response to the description of former President Bill Clinton. “He’s not writing them.”
When they turned to the plaque describing Mr. Biden, he changed his mind.
“Sleepy Joe Biden? It says that?” Mr. Rogan said. “Oh, my God, he is writing it. This is so crazy. That this is underneath a photo in the White House is so crazy.”
The plaque describes Mr. Biden as “nicknamed both ’Sleepy’ and ’Crooked.’”
Mr. Rogan was aghast.
“By you!” he exclaimed, laughing as he said the plaque pretends “like the whole public got together, ‘I got a name for this guy.’”
“You shouldn’t be allowed to do this, right?” Mr. Rogan said, suggesting the plaques, which are posted below the portraits on the White House’s Presidential Walk of Fame, should be written by historians.
Then he read the last line of the plaque under Mr. Biden’s photo: “‘Despite all, President Trump would get reelected in a landslide and save America’ – in all caps. That’s a plaque in the White House!”
“He’s not beating the dictator charges,” Mr. Gillis said. “This is like an African dictator.”
Mr. Rogan separately referred to Mr. Trump replacing Mr. Biden’s portrait with a photo of an autopen as “so crazy.”
Someone off-screen brought up the news that the Kennedy Center was being renamed after Mr. Trump.
“Oh, boy,” Mr. Rogan said. “Somebody needs to tell him, like, ‘Hey, this is not good. You can’t do that.’ Because then other people could do that too. And then the White House stops being the White House and becomes whoever is in its house, where he could just go crazy and say, ‘Everybody else is a crook.’”
Mr. Gillis said he does not think anyone would do the same.
“The problem is it opens up the door for someone on the left to do their version of it,” Mr. Rogan said.
He suggested California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 contender for the Democrats, would, noting he “copies everything that Trump does” and tries to talk like him on social media.
“You don’t think that he would put up plaques that talk about how corrupt Trump was and about how terrible, and [that] he was quoted as lying over 5,000 times by The Washington Post?” Mr. Rogan said.
Mr. Rogan and Mr. Gillis also discussed Mr. Trump’s social media post calling Reiner “a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star.”
The president claimed Reiner was killed over “the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.”
“It’s crazy. It’s all crazy,” Mr. Rogan said.
The son of Reiner and his wife, who has long struggled with drug addiction and mental health issues, faces murder charges for his parents’ deaths.
“When you see it with no empathy, that’s when it’s hard to like,” Mr. Rogan said. “There’s no justification for what he did that makes any sense in a compassionate society. It’s no different than people that were celebrating when Charlie Kirk got shot.”
Mr. Rogan summed up his thoughts with the same word he used for the entire sentiment: “It just shows you how crazy it is, the way Trump thinks and talks.”
