On episode 1372 of Part of the Problem, host Dave Smith and foreign policy analyst Scott Horton addressed Joe Rogan directly during a conversation about the backlash facing those who supported Donald Trump in 2024 and have since spoken out against his military actions.
Smith raised Rogan’s name while pushing back on critics who believe former Trump supporters should remain silent once they turn against his policies. For Smith, the argument was straightforward: “Rogan came out and criticized the war and then people are like giving him a hard time because he supported Trump and you’re like, dude, he’s the most influential guy in the country. You don’t want the most influential guy in the country to be against this thing right now?”
Smith framed this as a tactical question. In his view, demanding that Rogan or anyone else with a large platform stay quiet because of a prior Trump endorsement was counterproductive to the anti-war cause.
He had made a similar point in a Twitter exchange with journalist Mehdi Hasan, arguing that the anti-war movement should welcome voices regardless of who they previously voted for, rather than gatekeep based on past electoral choices.
Scott Horton agreed and extended the argument: “Just on that last point, and this goes for you and for Rogan, too. It’s more important that y’all are former Trump supporters who changed your mind. That’s how you’re listed in this thing… I think it does work out for the best that you’re listed in a long list of names of people who supported him and avowedly so, endorsed him, not just voted for him, but endorsed him, who then said, ‘Oh, man, but I’m not going with him down this road on whichever road it was, and even including in his first year of his second term here.'”
Horton went further, suggesting there was genuine political value in being a former Trump supporter now opposed to his foreign policy decisions.
“In a way, if you understand my meaning here, I wish I’d had voted for him just so I could also be a former Trump supporter kind of thing. The same way as it would be better for my argument if I had ever been in the army.”
His point was that credibility with a pro-Trump audience comes, at least in part, from having been part of that coalition in the first place.
Both Smith and Horton treated Rogan’s willingness to criticize the war as an asset, not a liability, and resisted the idea that prior Trump support disqualified anyone from being a legitimate voice in the anti-war conversation.
For Smith, the only relevant question was whether powerful voices were speaking out. For Horton, those voices carried the most weight precisely because they came from within the coalition that brought Trump to power.
