“He’s the weathervane,” Doug Schoen, a political consultant who advised Bill Clinton and is now a regular analyst on Fox News, said of Rogan. 

The three-hour audience he provided Trump on the eve of the 2024 election, and his subsequent endorsement, is regarded by many as a pivotal moment in that contest. Certainly, Trump seemed to think so, inviting Rogan to the Oval Office.

Earlier this week, though, the podcaster recoiled when faced with the particulars of Trump’s signature campaign promise to undertake the largest deportation of illegal immigrants in American history. In particular, Rogan appeared shaken by the death of Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis woman who was shot dead by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent under contested circumstances.

“It just seemed all kinds of wrong to me,” Rogan told Kentucky Senator Rand Paul during the tail end of a nearly three-hour discussion in his Austin studio that aired on Tuesday. “She didn’t seem mentally healthy but does that mean she should be shot in the head? Is there no other way to handle this?”

Later, Rogan would invoke the Nazis when describing the masked and militarized ICE agents roaming Minneapolis streets. “Are we really going to be the Gestapo? ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?” he asked.

It is hard to say whether Rogan’s misgivings will moderate Trump. On Thursday, with Minneapolis’ wintry air clouded with tear gas and the shriek of whistling anti-ICE protesters, the president threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military.

Asked about Rogan’s criticism, one White House official said the administration stood by ICE officers but had “ongoing discussions with a variety of new media outlets on many topics” and wanted to keep “an open dialogue.”

To some pundits, though, a wavering Rogan represents a kind of watershed moment for Trump and his MAGA movement just as Cronkite did for LBJ. 

“He has a huge audience, and a lot of people listen to him, both directly and indirectly,” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the left-leaning New America think tank, observed. “So when he says ‘enough with this ICE brutality!’ he is clarifying an uncertain and possibly ambiguous moment for many people, and coming down firmly on the side of civil liberties.”

According to Schoen’s polling, many of the voters who crossed over to Trump in 2024, particularly Hispanic men, have become so disenchanted by the ICE raids that they are fleeing, leaving behind a molten MAGA core. 

“The killing of Good could well be… an inflection point in public opinion,” he predicted, likening the episode to the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 that supercharged the Black Lives Matter movement.

Only November’s midterm elections will confirm whether that is, in fact, the case—or yet another instance in which prophecies of Trump’s doom have proved wildly offbase.

Rogan himself has never been easy to pin down. Before he supported Trump, for example, he was an ardent Sen. Bernie Sanders fan, and even still he has him on his podcast. Like many of his own fans, his positions hew to no established ideology and, at times, veer into the conspiracy world. 

“The most useful way to think about Joe Rogan is as America’s most famous swing voter,” is how Ben Burgis, a Rutgers professor and contributor to the leftist magazine Jacobin, described him on X this week.

Rogan’s background is certainly unorthodox. He cut his teeth as a martial arts expert and stand-up comic before becoming an oddball character in the mid-1990s television sitcom “News Radio.” From there, he went on to host the lurid reality show “Fear Factor,” holding court while contestants were swarmed by rats or sipped expired egg nog. 

He was early to the podcast revolution, launching his show in 2009. The Covid pandemic was a turning point, both revealing the scale of his audience and a talent for intuiting the sentiments of an uneasy public that distrusted elites and seemed to prize authenticity over expertise. 

It was Rogan who prompted outrage in 2021 when he suggested to his listeners that healthy young people probably did not need to be vaccinated. “I’m not sure that taking scientific advice from Joe Rogan is perhaps the most productive way for people to get their information,” Kate Bedingfield, a Biden administration spokesperson, sniffed.

They might have paid better mind: Rogan sensed the backlash brewing, particularly among young men, to what they saw as draconian Covid restrictions well before the White House and the public health establishment. (Of Anthony Fauci, the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Rogan recently remarked: “That guy was driving me f—ing crazy!”) He was also at the forefront of the counter-revolution against “wokeism” and cancel culture.

Guests on “The Joe Rogan Experience” range from UFO enthusiasts, Hollywood A-listers and scientists to fellow comedians of varying degrees of fame. In one of his most famous episodes, he enticed billionaire Elon Musk to smoke a joint, provoking a noticeable dent in Tesla’s share price. Rogan’s podcast has also served as a breeding ground for a generation of younger stars, including Theo Von and Andrew Schulz, who popularized the “manosphere” and infused MAGA with youth and testosterone.  

Even as his clout has grown, though, Rogan has sought to disavow his authority. In June, for example, he exclaimed: “I don’t want to be the news. I like talking s—. I like having a bunch of comedians here…or scientists. I like to have fascinating people in here…I don’t want to be someone who distributes information to the masses that’s been lied to. I don’t have any lofty goals like that.”

That pose tends to rankle Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and fellow podcaster who faults Rogan for amplifying misinformation: “It’s literally not too much to say that he not only got Trump elected, he got RFK Jr. put in charge of our health establishment.” 

The Rogan-Trump alliance was born in the blood and sweat of an Ultimate Fighting Championship octagon. Rogan is a UFC commentator and Trump a fan. The UFC chief executive, Dana White, told Rolling Stone that he made it a mission to bring Rogan on board MAGA before the 2024 election. 

Rogan’s Trump interview—which was released less than two weeks before Election Day—has been viewed 61 million times on YouTube, and prompted Democrats to lament how they lost the podcaster. When Trump celebrated victory, White joined him on stage and thanked “the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.”

Yet even before Rogan’s comments this week, there were signs that he was growing uneasy with the president’s maximalist second term. He questioned the snatch-and-grab operation to oust Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, objected to the renaming of the Kennedy Center, accused the Trump administration of trying to “gaslight” people over the Jeffrey Epstein files and called out Trump for mocking Hollywood producer Rob Reiner after he and his wife were found dead in their home.

Immigration, though, may stand apart, as an issue that was the fulcrum of Trump’s campaign. In the president’s telling during his epic rallies, illegal immigrants are to blame for everything from housing shortages to rampant crime and economic decline. To often thunderous applause, the then-candidate promised to mount the largest deportation in American history.

So what changed for Rogan? 

Part of it may be the video. The gruesome footage of Good’s killing has gone viral, like that of Floyd before her. It has also been accompanied by clips on social media of masked ICE agents who look as though they’re in a foreign war zone—not Minnesota.

“I mean, when people say it’s justifiable because the car hit him, it seemed like she was kind of turning the car away,” Rogan said, appearing to reject the administration’s attempt to portray Good as a domestic terrorist seeking to run over an ICE agent.

Those sentiments provoked “I-told-you-so” fury in some corners of social media. “Joe you f—ing pushed this agenda and everyone said this was what was gonna happen,” one Reddit user posted. “Now you sit here surprised. How about at least a f—ing apology.”

More broadly, however, Rogan appeared as torn by the vexed issue of immigration as so many other Americans. He faulted President Biden, for example, for losing control of the southern border and even—as some on the right allege–encouraging illegal immigration to pad Democratic voting rolls.

Yet he also seemed appalled at the idea of a wholesale emptying of communities, and particularly the strategy. “I mean, L.A. without Mexicans would be crazy,” he said at one point. Of ICE’s tactics, he asked: “Do they have a quota that they have to meet? Is that why they’re being so aggressive about it?”

“I think there’s a balance to be achieved,” he ultimately concluded. “I just don’t know how it gets done.”