Twitch personality and political commentator Hasan Piker did not hold back when footage of Joe Rogan surfaced at President Donald Trump‘s White House signing ceremony for an executive order on psychedelic d**g research. Spotting Rogan partially obscured behind a chair near the president, Piker delivered an assessment of what he saw.
“I didn’t initially notice him because he was hiding. He was hiding behind the high chair because he’s a tiny, tiny man,” Piker said during his broadcast.
The moment struck Piker as particularly ironic given Rogan’s recent public comments about his political identity. On a recent episode of his podcast featuring guest Arsenio Hall, Rogan described himself as having no real political home, saying: “I’m politically homeless. I’ve always been politically homeless for a long time. Neither one of them make any sense to me.”
Piker was quick to connect the dots. “Remember when Joe Rogan was like why is Trump doing this? Why is Trump doing this? Joe ‘Oh I feel politically homeless’ Rogan. Joe ‘Oh I’m not actually a Republican’ Rogan,” he said sarcastically.
He also took aim at Rogan’s widely cited claim of standing 5’8″. “Yeah, no, he’s not 5’8″. Let’s be real. He’s like 5’4″, maybe,” Piker quipped.
Rogan’s White House appearance came as Trump formalized an executive order aimed at fast-tracking research into psychedelic treatments, including a directive for the FDA to issue priority vouchers for certain psychedelic stuff, with officials promising dramatically faster approval timelines than previous regulatory frameworks allowed.
Rogan, a longtime advocate for psychedelic research, reportedly texted Trump data on ibogaine’s potential for treating opioid dependency before the order took shape, and Trump recounted the exchange publicly at the event.
At the signing, Rogan made the case. “We have a gigantic opiate problem in this country, obviously. In 2024, more than 80,000 people passed away of overdoses. There’s more than 5 million people that are a**icted to opiates right now in this country. With one dose of ibogaine, more than 80% of people are free of that a**iction. With two doses, it’s more than 90%,” he said.
Trump, in turn, praised Rogan’s outreach and described how quickly the conversation moved from a text message to a policy action. “I sent him that information. The text message came back, ‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it.’ Literally that quick,” Trump said.
The White House appearance created a sizable gap between Rogan’s actions and the politically detached image he has been carefully constructing. During the Arsenio Hall episode, Rogan had pushed for what he described as a more pragmatic approach to governance.
“We need like a logical centrist government that just says there’s a lot of things that we should do to make this country a better place,” he said. “We can do these things and we don’t have to attach them to left or right.”
He also criticized partisan loyalty as little more than team sports mentality. “It’s a team thing. It’s like the Dolphins versus the Raiders. You pick a team and your team rules and the other team sucks,” he said, adding: “There’s a lot of people out there that are not open-minded and they love a good rigid ideology that they could adhere to. So now I don’t have to think for myself.”
Political commentator Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk took aim at the same contradiction, acknowledging the policy merits while questioning Rogan’s judgment in attending the ceremony. “Do I support the policy of loosening the primitive regulations around psychedelic d**gs? Of course I do. But, hey, man, time and a place. You also could have said, oh, sorry, I can’t make it that day,” Kulinski said. He also pointed out that Trump’s approval ratings were sitting in the high 30s across multiple polls at the time. “Great time to snuggle up, Joe Rogan,” he added.
For Kulinski, Rogan’s social circle explains the rest. The podcaster moves in an orbit that includes UFC president Dana White, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., JD Vance, and Elon Musk, and Kulinski argued that those relationships make any genuine separation from Trump functionally impossible.
“Rogan will never fully break with Trump for the simple reason that he’s in the friend group,” Kulinski said. “They text with each other. They talk on the phone. They giggle, right? He’s in the club. And so now he’s never going to burn that bridge.”
That analysis lined up neatly with what Piker flagged as a telling pattern in Rogan’s commentary. “Yeah, now we know why he, whenever he talks about the Epstein stuff, he rarely ever. He never brings up Donald Trump,” Piker observed.
