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?”
A couple of months before Rogan had Trump’s ear, so too did comedian Theo Von.
During an episode of his This Past Weekend podcast, Von invited the then-candidate Trump on to discuss his views. Like Rogan, Von has notable guests from various backgrounds on his podcast, including Independents such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Democrats including Congressman Ro Khanna.
Von asked Trump about his family, and Trump asked Von about using cocaine. The two seemed to get along well, and that image was only further solidified when Von appeared in the audience at Trump’s inauguration.
But things got icy between Von and the Trump administration when the Department of Homeland Security shared an out-of-context clip of Von saying “heard you got deported, dude. Bye!” in a social media post celebrating ICE’s deportation raids.
Von instantly received blowback for appearing, even without consent, in the post, and he moved quickly to put distance between himself and the federal government.
“My father immigrated here from Nicaragua. One of my prized possessions is his immigration papers from when he came here — I have them in a frame,” Von said last week. “This was just f***** up. It was f***** up.”
Von even fired back at DHS directly, writing that he didn’t “approve to be used in this. I know you know my address so send a check. And please take this down and please keep me out of your ‘banger’ deportation videos.”
He later deleted the post.
Comedian Andrew Schulz has similarly distanced himself from Trump after interviewing him on his Flagrant podcast before the 2024 election.
“I voted for none of this,” Schulz said in July. “He’s doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for. I want him to stop the wars — he’s funding them. I want him to shrink spending, reduce the budget — he’s increasing it. It’s like everything that he said he’s going to do — except sending immigrants back, and now he’s even flip-flopped on that, which I kind of like.”
He also offered unsolicited advice to the Democratic Party, insisting that they have a chance to win back voters by calling out Trump’s lies.
“You have an opportunity to be like, hey, we told you he was a liar. Here’s the proof that he’s a liar. Come over here, here are some ideas that might be better,” he said. “You might like these. If you just go, hey, f*** you, you’re dumb, the people that are called dumb are never going to come to your side.”
Democrats and many media fact-checkers have been calling out Trump’s lies for more than a decade at this point, but that did not stop Schulz from voting for him in 2024.
The list goes on. The Nelk Boys have boosted Trump for years on their Full Send podcast and went so far as to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on in July 2025 — a move that earned them immediate criticism and prompted them to say they wanted “to maybe stay out of politics for a little bit because we just want to have fun, too.”
Stepping away seems to be the move for many of the people mentioned on the list. Logan Paul, Ross, and the Nelk Boys have all indicated they’d rather not play in politics anymore now that things are getting especially nasty in America.
