Here’s what Trump was doing while his rally-goers in Michigan were waiting for him in the cold for hours on end. As the AP reported, a lot of them decided not to wait while he recorded a podcast with Joe Rogan:
Many of Donald Trump’s supporters left a Michigan rally before he arrived after the former president kept them waiting for three hours to tape a popular podcast interview.
Those who remained at the outdoor rally on an airport tarmac huddled in the cold Friday night as they waited for the former president to touch down in the battleground state.
Trump apologized to the crowd for the delay, which he blamed on an interview with Joe Rogan, the nation’s most listened-to podcaster and an influential voice with younger male voters Trump is aggressively courting.
During a portion of the three hour debacle, Trump was asked by Rogan about his bogus claims that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him, with Rogan literally laughing in Trump’s face when he accidentally slipped and admitted he lost:
Joe Rogan could be seen laughing as he pressed former president Donald Trump for specifics on how the election was stolen in 2020.
The Republican nominee sat down Friday for an interview with the No. 1 podcaster. The interview ran for three hours and delayed Trump’s appearance in Traverse City, Michigan, later in the day.
At one point, Trump and Rogan started to discuss the 2020 election.
“I won by like,” Trump said, “I lost by like…I didn’t lose.”
Rogan could then be seen laughing.
“They say I lost, Joe, they say I lost by 22,000 votes,” Trump continued. “That’s like one one-tenth of one percent, it’s less than that. It’s a tiny little thing. Twenty-two thousand votes that’s spread all over this period.
“Fifty-one intelligent agents lied, they lied, they knew it was Hunter’s, it was from his bed. They said it was created by Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia. It was the Russia hoax.”
Here’s more on some of the back and forth where Rogan kept asking Trump to present some evidence for his claims, with Trump twisting himself in knots before pivoting to Hunter Biden’s “laptop.”
“I wanna talk about 2020 because you said over and over again that you were robbed in 2020,” Rogan said. “How do you think you were robbed?”
The question led to this exchange:
TRUMP: That election was so crooked, it was the most crooked election.
ROGAN: Ok, but give me some examples of how.
TRUMP: Well, let’s start, let’s start at the top and the easy ones. They were supposed to get legislative approval to do the things they did, and they didn’t get it in many cases, They didn’t get it.
ROGAN: What things?
TRUMP: Anything.
ROGAN: Legislative approval of?
TRUMP: Like for extensions of the voting, for voting earlier. All this different things By law, they had to get legislative approvals. You don’t have to go any further than that. If you take a look at Wisconsin, they virtually admitted that the election was rigged, robbed, and stolen. They wouldn’t give access in certain areas to the ballots because the ballots weren’t signed. They weren’t originals. They were– we could go into this stuff. We could go into the ballots, or we could go into the overall. I’ll give you another way.
ROGAN: Are you gonna present this ever?
TRUMP: Uh.
ROGAN: Do you think, like–
TRUMP: Let me give you just one more. Fifty-one intelligence agents come up that the laptop was from Russia. It turned out to be totally false.
The former president then pivoted to the Hunter Biden laptop story, which prompted 51 former U.S. intelligence officials to pen a letter claiming the story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation” ahead of the 2020 election.
