Joe Rogan and Dave Portnoy are already distancing themselves from Trump’s agenda

Just a few months into Donald Trump’s second term, are the manosphere influencers who championed him already starting to backpedal?

In a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, host Joe Rogan raised concerns about the president’s decision to send undocumented immigrants directly to El Salvador’s mega-prisons—without trial, lawyers, or, as critics argue, any semblance of due process.

“What if you are an enemy of, let’s not say any current president. Let’s pretend we got a new president, totally new guy in 2028, and this is a common practice now of just rounding up gang members with no due process and shipping them to El Salvador, ‘you’re a gang member.’ ‘No, I’m not.’ ‘Prove it.’ ‘What? I got to go to court.’ ‘No. No due process,’” said Rogan. “We gotta be careful we don’t become monsters, while fighting monsters.”

For those who had been sounding the alarm during Trump’s campaign, it was a painful watch. “Watching Joe Rogan figure this shit out in real time is painful,” one commenter wrote. “That ol’ ‘Even a broken clock is right twice a day’ idiom comes to mind,” another added. As one Reddit comment pointed out, “Why does he need to use a hypothetical president to make this point? This entire commentary describes the current administration.”

This election cycle, Trump owes at least part of his victory to Rogan and other manosphere influencers who endorsed him. After hosting the now-president on The Joe Rogan Experience—in what became one of the most-watched podcast episodes of all time, with 58 million views at the time of writing—Rogan followed up with a full-throated endorsement just one day before the 2024 election. Are we now seeing the first cracks appear?

Rogan isn’t the only vocal Trump supporter expressing unease in recent weeks. Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, who publicly backed Trump during the campaign, voiced frustration after the president’s rollout of sweeping tariffs sent markets into a nosedive. Portnoy claimed he lost $7 million in the aftermath.

“So, Trump rolls out the tariffs, right?” Portnoy said in a livestream posted April 7. “This is a decision that one guy made that crashed the whole stock market. That’s why we’re calling it ‘Orange Monday’ and not ‘Black Monday.’”

Just days earlier, Portnoy had reaffirmed his support for Trump. “I voted for Trump, I think he’s a smart guy,” he said in a clip. “I also think he’s playing a high-stakes game here. I’m gonna roll with him for a couple days, a couple weeks, see how this pans out.” By Monday, he said his estimated losses had climbed to $20 million.