Trump during the shooting.
Photo: The Joe Rogan Experience

Two hours and forty minutes after Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump, America’s most influential podcaster finally asked the former president about at least one of his most common obsessions. “One of the things I wanted to talk to you about was the JFK files,” Rogan said, before mildly pressing Trump for a reason why he hasn’t fully released the secret files on the assassination that many Americans have enthralled who believe the government played a role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Trump said there are still some people alive “who have been affected” – to which Rogan suggested these people were “involved” in a plot to assassinate Kennedy. “When there are living people, you usually don’t want to do that,” Trump said.

It appears that Joe Rogan himself took the same protect-the-living approach on Friday, to Trump’s benefit, regarding another obsession of his: the mysteriously well-connected sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Since Epstein killed himself in a Manhattan cell in 2019 to avoid prosecution for alleged sex trafficking, the top podcaster has returned to the case again and again on his show. In a 2020 interview with a former CIA agent, Rogan suggested that Epstein did not commit suicide and discussed at length the theory that he was an Israeli intelligence operative tasked with gaining influence over the world’s rich and powerful. In 2022, he told COVID skeptic Alex Berenson how conspirator Alex Jones told him years ago about “an island where they take influential people and have sex with underage people.” In 2023, Rogan speculated that Epstein’s painting of Bill Clinton in a dress in his Upper East Side mansion was a reminder of his influence over the former president. He has discussed the Epstein conspiracies with comedian friends such as Shane Gillis, Tim Dillon and Whitney Cummings. In August, Rogan wasn’t afraid to ask billionaire and former FBI informant Peter Thiel about his planned meetings with Epstein in 2014 — six years after the financier went to prison for sex crimes. (Of course, Thiel disagreed with Rogan’s thoughts about Epstein having “dirt” on the most powerful people in the world.)

But in his three-hour interview with Donald Trump released Friday evening — a major win for both host and guest — Joe Rogan did not once ask Donald Trump about Jeffrey Epstein.

Rogan and Trump in the studio on Friday.
Photo: Screencap/The Joe Rogan Experience

They had a lot to talk about. Trump was long-winded, muddled but clear as he discussed how impressed he was with the Lincoln bedroom in the White House, and how the word “tariff” is “more beautiful than love.” Rogan urged Trump to bash Harris on her policies during the 2020 Democratic primaries, and they both discussed their thoughts on wind turbines. (Rogan said they are “dirty” and ugly, while Trump called them “bird graveyards” and suggested they could make whales suicidal. “I want to be a whale psychiatrist,” he added.) Trump claimed that Google CEO Sundar Pichai told him that his stunt performance at McDonald’s this week was “one of the biggest things we’ve ever had on Google.”

But Joe Rogan didn’t ask Donald Trump about his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein in the 1990s. He didn’t ask Trump if he wanted to fly on Epstein’s infamous plane. He did not ask Trump about Epstein’s alleged victims’ (unsubstantiated) claims that Trump had sex with them. He did not ask Trump this week about the new allegation from model Stacey Williams, who claimed that Donald Trump groped her in Trump Tower in 1993 while Epstein watched. And he didn’t ask Trump about his 2002 comment that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” (Trump has denied wrongdoing in all of the above allegations.)

Maybe – as Trump told Rogan – when there are living people, you usually don’t want to ask about them.