From “Inside the Hive”: Behind Donald Trump's “Bro Podcast” Binge
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Hey, political scene listeners, it's Tyler. As you, the listeners of a political podcast, know, podcasts are hardly a new medium in the political landscape. But some of the most viral moments of the 2024 election have come from spaces that might have seemed unlikely or out of the box just a few years ago. From comedians like Theo Vaughn to Twitch streamers like Aiden Ross. How is it that these so-called podcast bros have come to play such a crucial role in this election?

Today, we're bringing you an episode all about this from our friends over at Inside the Hive from Vanity Fair, featuring Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis and Bloomberg reporter Ashley Carman. Give it a listen. I think you'll enjoy the conversation. Helen, is Donald Trump a podcast bro now? Yeah, I think he's missed his calling, really. Like, this is a man who likes to ramble for hours about sharks and Hannibal Lecter to a kind of audience of people who don't interrupt him. And that's pretty much what podcasts can offer you.

That is Helen Lewis, a staff writer for The Atlantic, who just penned a column all about Trump's podcast tour. And I'm Brian Stelter. Welcome to Inside the Hive from Vanity Fair. This week on this podcast, we are getting a little meta and going inside the political podcasting strategy that's emerging, especially on the right. Trump is targeting young men with hits on popular pods. But do these interviews hurt him more than they help?

I'm also joined by Ashley Carman, the superstar Bloomberg news reporter who covers all things audio. Ashley, set the stage for us. You've been covering all things podcasting for years. You know this business better than anybody. In 2016, there was talk about a podcast election. In 2020, I heard that phrase again. Is it more accurate this year? Is 2024 actually the podcast election?

Yeah, I think what we've seen is when you talk about those prior elections, what we were really talking about is we saw a lot of politicians start their own podcasts. Lots of folks have started podcasts. I think Hillary Clinton had one for a time. This was also going back to around the 2016 election. It was really a way for them to get their message out.

Now what we're kind of talking about is these established native podcast stars who have very captivative, large audiences who they're able to reach and bring politicians on as guests and really allow them to share their message there versus on their own platform. And is it right to say that Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, are using this medium more than Kamala Harris and Tim Walz?

Certainly since J.D. became Trump's running mate and Tim Walz became Kamala's running mate,

J.D. and Trump have really been the ones to go on quite a lot of podcasts. Tim Walz has done some appearances, but more so on actually, I would say, traditional news outlets. He went on the Ezra Klein show. He's gone on public radio stations, whereas Trump and J.D. have gone more on, again, kind of these native podcasters shows where they are kind of

Less of a interview style show where they're going to be, you know, really asking about the issues. It's more of a conversation about whatever.

they want to talk about. I know, Helen, you've been listening to lots of these shows. You have immersed yourself in that world. What are some of the examples of the shows that Trump and Vance have appeared on recently? So Trump has been on a tour of, I think it is fair to say, bro podcasts. We know he's got a big lead among young men in particular. There is a genuinely big gender gap in polling.

And so he's been on podcasts by Louisiana, former stand-up comedian called Theo Vaughn, the live streamer, Adin Ross, Lex Friedman, who came out of AI research, Logan Paul, who was a YouTuber and is now a boxer and martial arts fighter. So, you know, there is a kind of commonality between this kind of all of this world, right? It overlaps between lots of things that guys tend to be interested in, you know, more traditionally male interests and pursuits.

But it is also, yeah, a very kind of young anti-establishment world. Like these guys in other situations would think of themselves as kind of quite punky. And so it's quite funny that Aden Ross, you know, somebody who's ended up saying explicitly he's a Trump supporter, he gave Trump a Rolex. You're a hero. I want to present to you this gift right here. I hope you like watches, Rolexes. Oh, that's a beautiful watch. Should I open it? You should open it and then show the camera. That's a great watch, actually. Good company.

There's good companies. You like Rolex? They like Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player and Arnold Palmer and all the golf guys and all the other guys too. It may have been too tasteless even for Donald Trump.

Well, I am the guy on this podcast, but I have to admit, I had not heard of all of these podcast bros. I had heard of some of the shows Trump and Vance have appeared on, but not all of them. Ashley, how would you characterize them? Are these all A-list shows? I mean, is there even a clear way to tell how popular these shows are?

Yeah, Trump has definitely gone on some pretty big shows. So Theo Vaughn, for example, I mean, he's been in the top podcast for many quarters now in the U.S., but during the second quarter of 2024, he was the ninth most popular podcast in the U.S.,

So Theo Vaughn is certainly a big name. A lot of the other folks he's gone on, Lex Friedman is definitely very popular. J.D., I know, has gone on Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and Bill O'Reilly. So those are more of the traditional names. Folks who have followed from the TV era, of course, know. So they've certainly gone for some of the most popular names in the space.

And these shows, are they full MAGA or are they more MAGA curious? Because I, you know, Meg Kelly, for example, is resolutely pro-Trump. But I think some of these other podcasts, it's more MAGA adjacent.

It sort of depends. Theo Vaughn, for example, did have Trump on, but then he also interviewed Bernie Sanders. I would say there's kind of a curiosity there. People would probably align them more to the right of politics for some of these shows, but others are kind of just, I would say, slightly open-minded to having different folks on.

And where have we seen Harris or Tim Walls appear? I remember listening to Doug Emhoff on Pod Save America earlier this month. So there has been some outreach, but in general, Harris is doing far fewer interviews. And that reality, I think, extends to the podcast universe.

Yeah, so Tim Walz has really been the one recently, at least, that's been going on podcasts. He went on Pod Save America. He's done Ezra Klein. I'm sure you have Trump voters in your family. I have Trump voters in my family. I do. I do. And I think a lot about how unappealing he is to me and how appealing he is to people I love. Yeah, me too. I spend a lot of time on that. He went on some public radio shows. And then, of course, you had the prominent TV interview that they both did together. But Tim has really been the one that's a bit more out there on the podcast circuit.

And

Do you think he's been well-received? Does it work? Is it working for him as a medium? You know, because it's interesting to evaluate how successful these candidates can be in various formats. Yeah. I mean, I haven't heard anything that would argue that he wasn't well-received. I would just say it was obviously noteworthy to both Helen and I and many other folks in media when Trump went on. Theo Vaughn and Lex Friedman and J.D. has been also making the rounds. I think it's less surprising when Tim goes on Pod Save America, for example. So it's just not

covered as widely. Yeah, I am intrigued by when and how podcast interviews get attention from other media, right? And Helen, for your project for The Atlantic, you know, you very purposely went down some of these right-wing rabbit holes and listened to these shows at length.

But I feel like, tell me if I'm wrong, there are times when politicians will go on podcasts and they might say something that does not get picked up by other media. We've seen that with J.D. Vance, where he was making comments in 2021 that have only been news now, right? That have now been dredged up and used against him years later. But those podcast interviews were not necessarily considerate.

considered newsworthy at the time. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I think that's true. I used to have a saying, which was, you can't get cancelled for anything you say on a podcast. I think there has been a feeling that, you know, text-based mediums and interviews can be very easily, you know, just screenshotted or whatever it is and end up circulating on Twitter when that was a big thing or other social media now. It has until quite recently been harder to clip things out of a podcast and make them go viral.

I think that's slightly changing now. But as you say, the danger of it, I think, is illustrated very well by J.D. Vance, which is that a lot of these podcasts, particularly in the kind of intellectual dark web space, which is a kind of more hybro space than the kind of podcast mostly that Trump has been going on now, which is much more kind of frat guy kind of feeling to them. In those podcasts, the idea was you dealt with dangerous ideas. You said the unsale, but you flirted with things that are really on the edges and the fringes.

And I think that's why maybe they could become quite dangerous for politicians, because when you're just having a discussion about, you know, race and IQ or something like that in this kind of quasi intellectual space, I think in that situation, politicians might not realize how that might look in the cold light of day to other people. Right, right. All right. So much more to talk about here. A meta episode about podcasting. We'll be back with Ashley and Helen in just a minute.

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Hey, welcome back to Inside the Hive from Vanity Fair. I'm Brian Seltzer talking with Ashley Carmen of Bloomberg and Helen Lewis of The Atlantic.

Ashley, I was just in a recording studio the other day updating the audio book version of my book about Trump and Fox. And I was thinking about how there's such a personal connection when someone is talking right into your ears. So how does that play in the political sphere? How does that make Trump or Vance, for example, sound different? Do you think they come across differently when they're in the audio space versus, let's say, the debate that we all watched on Tuesday night?

Well, certainly for anyone that goes on a podcast, if you're going on a show where the listeners have a dedicated relationship with the host, naturally, you're going to benefit from that in some way because they trust the host to curate their guests and have a real conversation with them. So if you're on there, you're kind of vetted and vouched for in that sense. I would also say, of course,

There's no video in many cases. And if it's an audio only experience, there's something about just being able to

Imagine the conversation, sort of fill in the blanks yourself rather than necessarily focus in on every facial reaction or body language movement that you might in video formats. Yeah, that's such a great point. You think about the debate and how the television debate was all about the split screen, watching Harris's facial expressions, reacting to Trump.

Helen, when you were listening to these podcasts, did you hear a different kind of Donald Trump because you didn't see his facial expressions?

Well, I consume these on YouTube because I like to follow along with the transcript just to kind of check the quotes. So I didn't quite have that experience. But I did think it was very, very interesting on Theo Vaughn's podcast because what you could see from Donald Trump was genuine interest. The thing that piqued my curiosity about it was the fact that I heard Donald Trump genuinely asking questions, like showing interest in Theo Vaughn. Is cocaine a stronger... Oh, yeah. ...up?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're way up with cocaine more than anything else you can think of. Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie. You know what I'm saying? You'll be out on your own porch, you know? You'll be your own street lamp. You're freaking. And is that a good feeling? No. It's a miserable feeling. But you do it anyway, just like the guy you're saying with the scotch.

Now, what he was showing interest in was his past cocaine addiction and addiction to alcohol. But he was asking genuinely curious questions, which is not a tone that I really associate with Donald Trump. So I wonder if that would have come across quite as strongly in the audio, but certainly on video, even though it's a very static experience, it really made the kind of emotions very noticeable.

Yeah, again, a contrast to the debate where he was on the defensive, where he was being baited by Harris, where he seemed almost out of his element at times during the debate. When you watch him talking with Theo Vaughn, he is comfortable. He's inquisitive. It's a very different version of Donald Trump.

And to me, that's why he would do these podcasts, because they aim at a completely different audience and use a completely different tone. I mean, you know, sometimes in various ones of these, this recent tour, he has talked about Iran policy, for example, or Gaza. But he gets away with talking in the most broad brush generalities you can possibly imagine. You know, I've got a plan for Ukraine. I've got a plan. This would never have happened under me.

But the one thing that he does get to do as well is just go on these incredibly long flights of fancy. There was a very long section in the Logan Paul one about the border, in which you'd think he would stick to the campaign talking points, you know, Kamala Harris is letting all these illegal immigrants in, blah, blah, blah.

Believe it or not, the best thing to find it, you can spend millions of dollars on equipment and machinery to find drugs coming through, like, you know, sort of finds it. The best thing is a German shepherd born in a certain... Do you know that? Oh, they're unbelievable. They go right to it. And actually, he ended up talking about German shepherds and what a great dog they were and how they were much more useful than $40 million worth of equipment. And that that

That sort of doesn't sound as bizarre on a podcast as I think it would do in a TV interview or even a TV debate. Yeah, that is fascinating. I find myself thinking that people like yours truly who cover the media, you know, Ashley, someone covering this podcast space, we've been covering politicians taking advantage of these new platforms. You know, like it is something new. And actually, maybe after 2024, this is not going to be groundbreaking anymore. Right.

It's just going to be part of the playbook for politics. You know, candidates will always be on in this format, this more unguarded, this looser, this more long form format. And we're not going to think of it as trendy. We're going to think of it as an established part of campaigning. Yeah. And I think also it's worth just bearing in mind that

Talk radio has existed for many years. Conservative talk radio is certainly a might in that industry and really important to the space. And we've really just seen them make that digital transition like we've seen in many other media formats. True, but don't you think about right-wing radio as being kind of a rage machine? You know, think about the late Rush Limbaugh or the current king, Sean Hannity. It's about hitting people's buttons, you know, stoking certain emotions. And I don't know if I think about long-form podcast interviews in the same way.

I think some. I mean, I guess what the point I'm making is Sean Hannity, Trump went on Sean Hannity's podcast. Trump went on Dan Bongino's podcast, who took over Rush Limbaugh's spot on the live radio version. So some of these folks are still in the space and they've made this transition to podcasts and now are finding their audience there. Right. Right. That's true. I think the best comparison isn't really with political interviews. It's with Oprah.

You know, it's with the view. It's with the chat show circuit. You know, that's the kind of interview that lots of times you will see politicians getting on these podcasts. You know, it's often very, very personal. As I say, I think Theo Vaughn's interview with Trump was genuinely illuminating because it revealed the kind of great psychological crisis of the fact that his older brother, you know, did descend into alcohol and drug abuse. What was his name, Donald? His name was Fred, Fred Trump. And he had a problem with alcohol.

Did you guys ever do anything fun together? Like one nice memory that you have with him? He had a great talent for flying. He was a pilot. Oh, sweet. And he loved it. And he ever fly with him. Uh, I did. I flow with him. He, he was a great pilot, but ultimately he had to give that because of the alcohol. He had to give that up, which was a hard thing for him to do, but he had to give that up.

And the fact that that must have had seeing your brother, who's I think six years older than you, and your very disciplinarian father, you know, being very kind of cruel about that, genuinely gave me an insight into a, you know, into a Trump that I don't think I've ever had from a more traditional adversarial journalistic interview. But it really, the best comparison for that is, you know, people used to go on Oprah and talk about their childhoods. That's what we're kind of talking about here. Yeah.

Ashley, do we have any sense of how the medium is growing, you know, comparing, let's say, prior election cycles to where we are now in 2024?

Yes. And I think it sort of speaks to why podcasts have become such a prominent vector for politicians to get their message out. In 2016, 21 percent of Americans over the age of 12 said they listened to a podcast in the past month. By 2023, that number had doubled to 42 percent. So it certainly is becoming a mainstream medium.

Ashley, I know you have to get back to work at Bloomberg. Thank you so much for talking with me. Yeah, thanks for having me. Helen, stick with me because we're talking about some of the upsides of political podcasting, but there are some downsides as well. J.D. Vance has learned that firsthand in the past few weeks. More on that in just a minute. Hey, if you're enjoying Inside the Hive, please rate and review it wherever you listen. And hit that follow button so you never miss an episode.

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Hey, welcome back to Inside the Hive from Vanity Fair. I'm Brian Stelter talking with Helen Lewis of The Atlantic. Her most recent piece on this topic is titled Trump's Red Pill Podcast Tour, subtitled Is This an Election Campaign or an Extended Ad for Energy Drinks?

So Helen, what energy drinks are they drinking over in the podcast manosphere? Oh, well, Logan Paul has his own energy drink prime. And there's a, quite a funny moment in the interview when he cuts off from, I think it is in foreign policy answer to go. And now, you know, a moment from our sponsors, which is me. Uh, and it's my energy drink. This episode is sponsored by myself. I sponsored her myself. Prime X guys. We just dropped prime X. Uh, this is our biggest launch ever. Uh,

It is a million-dollar treasure hunt. So after you buy your bottle and you open it... And it really highlighted to me the fact that traditional journalistic norms are completely out of the window when it comes to this stuff. So quite often, everybody there will be there plugging some product. There's a very funny visual of J.D. Vance when he went on the Nelk Boys podcast, Full Scent. They have a hard seltzer, which is called Happy Dad. And he's sitting, manspreading quite aggressively, between two cases of Happy Dad hard seltzer.

And it just looks quite bizarre. I mean, I guess traditional news organizations would probably have heavy branding for themselves, but you don't necessarily expect to see the kind of exact products being shilled in the middle of the interview. And then there's the fact that there's often very kind of cozy relationships between all of these people behind the scenes. So quite a few of them have invoked the name of Dana White, who is the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Oh, right. And, you know, he appeared at the Republican National Convention. He's become a big Trump supporter. And so he's obviously a pretty influential fixer behind the scenes in introducing Trump to some of these people. The other name that comes up a lot is Barron Trump. So that is Trump's 18-year-old son who's just started at college. And he's also said in at least two of these interviews that I've listened to, to be a big fan of the podcaster involved. Yeah.

Well, my boys said, oh, that's such a big show. I don't know what you're doing, but you really are respected and amazing. I appreciate it. You know, I go on to other shows, nobody does a big deal. So this is a kind of, you know, Trump's letting his teenage son kind of lead the strategy of these are podcasts he thinks will appeal to young men.

There is a lot of logic to that. And as I said, there's a lot of upside, but there's also downside. One of the other pieces you wrote this week was titled J.D. Vance's Very Weird Views About Women. And you point out that he has a back catalog, so to speak. Vance had appeared on all these podcasts, some of them years ago. What stands out to you about how some of those comments are coming back to haunt him now?

Well, I think you can get lured into a kind of cozy sense that it's just you and the microphone and the person that you're talking to. Whereas if you had all the kind of bells and whistles of a big TV interview, then maybe people would be more on their guard. Also, some of these podcasts are very long. The one that JD Vance got into trouble about, which was the one about the host says to him about the whole purpose of a post-menopausal female, in theory, is to stay alive in order so they can look after their children's children. I think that

discussion came at the end of well over an hour and a half's worth of chat. So they do kind of lure people into this much more kind of confessional chatty mode, which I think really is one of the reasons that people like them, right? That the campaign stump speech is so well polished, the campaign talking points get repeated so often, that podcasters are promising you this much more confessional chatty glimpse inside the real person, inside the kind of politician's suit.

Right. And so there's a lot of benefit that comes from that. There can be some dangers as well. Well, yeah, I think the lack of interruptions, I think, is really notable. So I went and compared, I don't know if you remember Jonathan Swan, who was then at Axios, interviewed Trump in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. And he really tried to kind of nail Trump down on like, when are we going to opening? Like, where is this advice you've seen? Where does it come from? Like, who are you reading? You know, just trying to drill specific facts out of him.

And that is so alien to the podcast ethos. You know, it is much more about going on these incredibly long flights of fancy that just meander off. I mean, you did see that with the debate performance, right? A question that starts off being about something ends up...

being about Haitians eating cats, this false story that's been going around. And that's, unfortunately, podcast interviews are kind of primed to do that, to ramble off the topic. Sometimes, as in the case of Theo Vaughan's podcast, you end up with genuinely interesting material. Sometimes you end up with just

sort of noun-free blather, like elevator music in words that just kind of, you just, there's absolutely nothing to latch onto in a factual sense. And these podcasters either don't have the journalistic training or the interest, or they don't see it as their job to kind of go stop there. You say you've got a great plan. What is the plan? Where can we see the plan? You know, like how will we judge whether or not the plan is a success? There's just none of that kind of level of

rigor. And I guess that has its upsides. People like that tone. It's more relaxing than listening to a broadcast news interview. But it definitely, in terms of democratic accountability, has big, big downsides. Yeah. As you point out in your piece, some of these podcasters, they don't even maintain, quote, even a thin veneer of journalistic detachment from the subjects, you know, and that's part of the appeal. But let's just not confuse it with journalism. That's what I would say. Let's just not confuse it with a accountability interview.

Right. And I think that's very obvious in the case of Lex Friedman, who is a very interesting interviewer and clearly a very smart guy. But he posted on LinkedIn last year that he had spent Thanksgiving with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, so Trump's daughter and son-in-law. And then now he's doing one of the big flagship interviews of the campaign.

These people often talk about the kind of terribly corrupt, cozy nature of the mainstream media, but they've just kind of ended up recreating the idea that everybody goes on holiday to the same places, hangs out in the same clubs, has the same set of mutual friends. Just one degree to the right of where the kind of original traditional media was. Hmm.

You're talking about how long some of these interviews are. So I just want to say, I'm still a fan of podcast editing. Shout out to our producer, Gianna Palmer. We, I think, benefit from trimming, from coming up with just the best moments. I guess Donald Trump would disagree, right? Because he would call that censorship. Yeah.

or something like that. Yeah, no, I'm always very grateful to my editor on the basis that it takes a lot longer to make something pithy and very well thought through than it does to just splurge everything onto the page. And I think there's a similar dimension with podcasts. But interestingly enough, I mean, you talk about listening to them in your car. I often listen to them when I'm doing chores around the house, right? It is a very different type of news consumption that you just are usually doing something else at the same time.

And I think that also accounts for the way that they are often quite fact-light. You know, they can't carry this much burden of information because people are not giving them their full attention. And again, that's the same thing with the way that we watch TV dramas now while also looking at our phone. I think there is a genuine assumption over the last 10, 15 years, maybe since the launch of smartphones, that half of people's brain will be somewhere else when they're consuming this content.

Right. It reminds me of the reporting from Hollywood that some streaming services want producers to pitch shows that are second screen friendly, that are produced on the assumption that folks are holding their phones, scrolling through social media while they're watching the TV show. And there's

There's a version of that for audio as well. It is, although I'm always surprised that these podcasts do so well on YouTube. I mean, that Theo Von interview had 13 million views on YouTube, which if you were in a traditional medium in America, you'd be pretty happy with that. So there are definitely people out there who want to watch essentially like a static video

shots of just people talking to each other. I mean, I find that I interviewed Jordan Peterson in 2018 and the camera, I remember the cameraman being like, who will want to watch this? Cause that really was long. And the answer was 69 million people so far. Um, so I think the stuff about the crisis of attention is, is interesting, but I don't know if we've quite got the way to describe it yet. And as you said at the very, the very start of this conversation, um,

Trump likes to talk. He likes to ramble. He likes to go on and on. Over the years, political strategists have said, maybe he should just have a TV show. He wouldn't want to run for president again if he just had his own cable news show. And maybe the better answer is give him his own podcast.

I mean, I think genuinely, I had thought he would fail on the rocks of not being interested in anyone else's life. But, you know, the Theo Vaughan interview kind of changed my mind slightly on that. It's really interesting. There was a book about his involvement with The Apprentice, you know, the great reality TV show that made his name. And I seem to remember that he gave the writer of that six interviews about it post-presidency. You know, he really did engage with it. And I think there is a weird sense in the way that he feels that

you know, his TV career was a kind of almost a greater achievement than having become president. And so I can almost imagine that if he had the number one top podcast in the world, that would almost be more interesting to him than being president or certainly doing the things that a president has to actually do, right? Rather than getting out of Air Force One and waving and people telling you that you're great. You ended your piece of The Atlantic by saying the podcast style has eaten American politics. What do you mean by that?

Well, I find it quite dispiriting that Kamala Harris obviously has not given a standalone one-on-one TV interview to a major news anchor. She did a joint interview on CNN with Tim Waltz, but she has also been avoiding that traditional accountability interview. It's just that she doesn't have a whole ecosystem of podcasts to go on in its stead.

So what I feel is that we have two parties who both don't really want to engage with the traditional media process in the way that they perhaps would have felt they had to 20 years ago, and maybe in electoral terms don't need to engage.

And that's the sad thing to me, because like you, I listen to a lot of podcasts. I enjoy a good podcast, but it is absolutely no replacement for that kind of rigor that you get from a journalistic interview. Yeah, the presidential candidates are welcome on this podcast anytime, but it will be journalism and it will be edited. Call me old fashioned. This was so interesting. Helen, thank you so much for the time. Thank you.

And once again, thanks to my guests, Helen Lewis, staff writer at The Atlantic, and Ashley Carman, reporter at Bloomberg News. This episode of Inside the Hive was produced by Gianna Palmer. We had engineering and mixing today by Vince Fairchild. And I'm Brian Stelter. You can find me on threads and X at Brian Stelter. And you can email us anytime. Let us know what you want to hear on the show in the months ahead. Email insidethehiveatvf.com.

We'll be back in your podcast feed next week. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I focus on stories where powerful people or institutions are doing something that's harming people or harming someone or something in some way. And so my job is to report that so exhaustively that we can reveal what's actually going on and present it to the public.

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