A very different Joe Rogan experience

Happy Monday. The president is casting doubt on the midterm election results. The attorney general is threatening “core protected First Amendment political speech.” And “60 Minutes” is driving the news cycle again. Plus, the first excerpt from Joe Biden’s memoir is out. So let’s get to it…

In 2024, Joe Rogan’s podcast was a platform for President Trump, helping him win reelection. This year, it’s a place for a whistleblower-style conversation alleging “corruption” at the highest levels of the Trump administration.

That’s quite a shift — and it doesn’t bode well for Trump’s final two years in office.

Rogan released an episode on Friday with Calley Means, the MAHA advocate and former advisor to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who shared why he resigned and singled out Susie Wiles for blame.

Wiles had already submitted her resignation by the time the episode was published, according to CNN’s reporting about Trump naming Stephen Miller his new chief of staff.

But Means certainly intended to get Wiles removed – and to call out the administration’s MAHA failures. He accused Wiles of “bowing to ‘unrelenting’ pressure from industry lobbyists while prioritizing political fund-raising over Americans’ health,” as this NYT recap puts it.

Means emphasized that his bigger target was the “system,” not Wiles. He told Rogan: “They’ve got the corporate money. They’ve got the complete and utter stranglehold of the DC environment, which is demonic. It’s demonic. We have you, we have truth getting out there. Like, and, and shaming the system. Shame works. Like, the truth getting out there actually works.”

Later in the show, Means said he would often “threaten” the possibility of “bad press” to push through his and RFK’s agenda items. “That’s all that moves anything,” he said… “All that matters is special interest money or whether they’re going to get a bad article [written] about them.”

“Oh my God,” Rogan sighed.

The whole conversation seemed to weigh heavily on the host, who’d generally rather be joking with friends or speculating about Bigfoot (that was in an episode earlier in the week).

The episode had an immediate impact. “We’re looking at this very case,” Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, told Dana Bash on “State of the Union” yesterday. GOP Sen. Ron Johnson also brought it up on Fox News, saying Means laid out DC corruption “in gory detail.”

Means taped a follow-up interview with Margaret Brennan for “Face the Nation” and said (among many other things) that some of Trump’s senior advisors treated the president “like a baby in many respects.”

Take a look at the CBS transcript, and you’ll see more than a dozen follow-ups and responses from people Means named and shamed. A Rogan episode has none of that journalistic balance or context. But some of his fans love the show for that very reason.

A spokesperson for Wiles told Axios that “Means’ accusations are outrageous, defamatory and provably false.” The legal threat implied by the word “defamatory” is interesting.

As for Means, he posted on X this morning urging “current and former leaders in the admin” to “speak to the press about what you saw.” 🤔

Trump is sort of blaming the messenger — i.e., himself — for the historic repudiation of his party in last week’s midterms.

“I think it was bad messaging, maybe by me, but I would talk about it all the time,” Trump said on “60 Minutes” in response to Ross Douthat’s question about economic discontent.

Trump quickly shifted the blame — “the press doesn’t cover positive news for Republicans” — but returned to the “bad messaging” excuse a moment later. In the interview, he seemed to accept the GOP’s loss. But just now on Truth Social, he fell back into a defensive election-denialism crouch.

“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest,” he wrote, using scare quotes. “How could the Polls be so wrong??? Some early voting ‘dumps’ were so large that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to vote. It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter!”

Now THAT is bad messaging…

“Since the midterm losses, Trump has spoken to reporters and did a phone interview with CNN, but ‘60 Minutes’ showed that there is still nothing like a sit-down one-on-one,” Deadline’s Ted Johnson wrote last night.

Douthat won a whole lot of praise for how he conducted the interview, “interrupting at points and following up at others,” Johnson wrote, “and getting to some places of revelation that many other interviews have not (like the afterlife).”

Yes, this headline conveyed one of the many takeaways: “Trump suggests he would rather go to hell than forgive enemies.”

“I do hate some of my enemies and I always will,” the president said.

>> Jonah Goldberg wrote on X, “Whatever criticisms or concerns folks had about Douthat moving to 60 Minutes, I think you have to acknowledge what an excellent job he did.”

Stephen Miller “now has the job of advancing an agenda that Americans rejected,” Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark wrote in a NYT guest essay this morning titled “There’s a New Roy Cohn in Town.”

There’s some important reporting to highlight in this Miller piece from The Atlantic’s team:

“One issue on which [Susie] Wiles and Miller seem to diverge: how to force journalists to reveal their sources in the government. Trump has pushed the Department of Justice to pursue criminal-leak investigations on national-security grounds, and there have been discussions in the White House and at DOJ about various tactics they could use — including arrests — as part of those efforts, according to three people familiar with the matter. Two of those people said that Wiles had pushed back. Miller, though, was in favor and insisted that it wouldn’t take long for journalists to give up their sources, they told us.”

>> Popular Information founder Judd Legum says major media outlets are “sanitizing” Miller’s “white nationalist ideas.”

>> Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, is ending her podcast, writing, “The time commitment is too great and now is the time to step away.” Some observers have cast doubt on how well the show was doing.

>> Trump says he was “only kidding” about wanting UFC boss Dana White to become White House press secretary. The two men are meeting today “about other matters.” The joke suggests he’s not taking the open press secretary joke very seriously, eh?

Attorney General Todd Blanche was not kidding when he said to CNN’s Dana Bash that the Democrats vowing to investigate Trump should be “very worried.” It was, as Mediaite’s Joe DePaolo wrote here, “a shocking interview.”

On CNN last night, Elie Honig called it a “pathetic display” by Blanche, “who seems to now want to be the speech and manners police more than the top federal prosecutor in the country.” He pointed out that Democrats are engaging in “core protected First Amendment political speech and nowhere near anything that would be a criminal felony threat.”

On Friday, we mentioned that Laura Loomer announced a “hiatus” from her live-streamed show. On Saturday, the Washington Post’s Drew Harwell and Scott Nover made her timing seem even more curious.

Loomer, they reported, “has been paid by private clients to make political posts on social media without publicly disclosing the payments.” They contacted Loomer about this, and “roughly one hour” later, she announced the “hiatus.”

This part of her comment to the Post — “it’s not illegal to make a living in America” — spread widely on social media. Here’s a gift link to the full story…

The latest evidence that the hosts of “Pod Save America” are “the Democratic Party’s Crooked Kingmakers”: The media brand’s Crooked Con was “the first major national Democratic gathering since the party’s historic midterm sweep,” with many 2028 hopefuls in attendance, as Playbook noted yesterday.

CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan was there, and here are some highlights from his interviews…

After its 2024 defeat, the DNC overhauled its digital operation with a simple directive: “Put the posters in charge,” senior strategist Tim Hogan told Semafor’s Max Tani.

The party built a network of more than 700 unpaid creators to spread clips, often without attribution. “We were mostly interested in increasing the surface area of our messaging on every single part of the internet,” Paulina Mangubat, the DNC’s head of content, said.

As Tani notes, it’s “yet another sign that what we see on social media isn’t as organic as it may appear at first glance…”

Joe Biden’s memoir, “Promise Me, America,” is out next week, but the former president says his cancer treatment will keep him from making many promotional appearances for it.

“Some days are better than others. It hasn’t stopped me. But sometimes it slows me down,” he wrote on X last night while signaling a limited book tour rollout. I haven’t seen any announcement about a first TV interview yet. This morning The Atlantic published the first excerpt from the book…

Following days of criticism, The Free Press removed a video in which reporter Maya Sulkin falsely claimed that Abdul El-Sayed delivered his victory speech in Arabic. (He only said a few words in Arabic.)

“We deleted an opinion video about the use of foreign languages in election night speeches,” Sunday’s correction post on X stated. “The post contained a factual error and its tone fell short of what we believe advances healthy public discourse. The rigorous editorial process that produces the work that appears on our website and in our newsletters must apply to everything we post on social media. We’ll be updating how we do things to achieve just that. We regret the error.”

Usual disclosure here: The Free Press is owned by Skydance, which also owns CNN.

“Straight Arrow News, the Omaha-based national news organization founded by billionaire Joe Ricketts that claimed an unbiased approach to journalism, is shutting down.” Rob McLean (who used to edit this newsletter!) and Andrew Smith have a full report for the Omaha World-Herald here.

“Belief in a mission does not by itself make a business sustainable,” Ricketts wrote in an open letter. “After considerable investment and effort, I have made the difficult decision to cease Straight Arrow’s operations.”

After winning her fight to be reinstated at The Washington Post, former opinion columnist Karen Attiah has decided not to return, Natalie Korach scooped for Status last night. Attiah’s settlement includes back pay.

“I think I just didn’t feel safe returning and that I would be protected,” Attiah told Korach. “It’s not just a job. It’s also about whether I could be able to do the journalism that I not only wanted to do, but that I think the readers deserved.” Attiah initially hoped to return, Korach wrote, but “wanted to know whether she would be permitted to write freely under the paper’s leadership.” Ultimately, “she did not get those assurances.”

“I still wish there were more answers about what exactly went down,” she said. “But I tried to fight the good fight.”

“Russell Brand’s conviction for rape and sexual assault came about as a direct result of investigative journalism by The Times, Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches,” Dominic Ponsford writes for the Press Gazette. Some of the reporting “came under attack” during Brand’s trial and was “vindicated” by the guilty verdict last week…

“You Can See Everything” swept the Critics Choice Documentary Awards last night.

In its fourth weekend at the box office, it came in fourth overall. “Some now think this documentary has a shot at $100 million stateside,” Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro wrote.

>> “Godzilla Minus Zero” was #1 overall, followed by “The Cat in the Hat,” which I saw with the family and absolutely adored…

This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.