‘I really really wish I never got into politics’: Bro influencers who backed Trump are turning on the MAGA movement
Podcasters and livestreamers with primarily male audiences who boosted President Donald Trump’s 2024 election campaign are reportedly feeling buyer’s remorse after peddling him to their hundreds of thousands of viewers.
In the run-up to the 2024 election, Trump made the rounds on livestreams and podcasts. He kicked back with WWE wrestler and YouTuber Logan Paul on his Impaulsive podcast. He listened to music in a garish Cybertruck decorated with the image of his fist in the air after an assassination attempt with Kick streamer Adin Ross. He chatted with Theo Von, Joe Rogan, and the Nelk Boys.
While these streamers and podcasters may mean nothing to some readers, they collectively have millions of fans — overwhelmingly young men and boys — who tune in to their hours-long programming regularly and were fed Trump by their favorite influencers.
Now, as Trump continues to threaten military invasions of Democrat-run cities and masked ICE agents continue to kidnap and deport legal and illegal immigrants alike, some of these influencers are feeling uneasy about their affiliation with the president, according to a new Rolling Stone report.
“I really, really wish I never got into politics,” Ross, 26, recently said during a livestream. “I just don’t think I’ll ever care enough again for another politician.”
When he was 23, Ross struggled to pronounce the word “fascist” on a stream after seeing someone use the word to describe Trump. He then spent several minutes trying to wrap his head around its meaning while his chat laughed at his ignorance.
Around two years later, he had an hour of one-on-one time with Trump. The then-candidate Trump told Ross his son, Baron, was a “big fan,” and Ross later encouraged his viewers to vote for the Republican in November.
Now, Ross wants to avoid his association with Trump altogether, and he’s not alone.
Rogan, the king of podcasting, has also publicly balked at the Trump administration doing exactly what it said it was going to do through a ramped-up deportation agenda.
“This is kind of crazy that that could be possible,” he said during a March episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.
He was commenting on the hundreds of Venezuelan migrants who were deported to Trump’s El Salvadoran mega prison for detention without any kind of due process.
“The cause is, let’s get the gang members out — everybody agrees — but let’s not let innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs,” he said.
As ICE’s violent, masked raids intensified over the summer, Rogan — who spent three hours interviewing Trump in October 2024 and later hugged the president at UFC 309 after his re-election — called the federal agency’s tactics “insane.”
“There’s two things that are insane,” Rogan said during a July episode of his podcast. “One is the targeting of migrant workers — not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers — just construction workers. Showing up at construction sites, raiding them. Gardeners. Like, really?”
