How 9 Popular YouTubers Helped Trump Win a Second Term

As Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th US President on Monday, he was surrounded by his family, donors and wealthy tech executives. Just a few feet farther away stood a political newcomer who’s been credited with encouraging lots of votes: Joe Rogan.

The fact that Rogan, the host of the world’s most popular podcast, watched from the Capitol Rotunda as Republican luminaries like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis were confined to overflow speaks volumes about the new dynamics at play in Washington and the media writ large. Over the past two years, a set of massively popular podcasters and streamers cemented themselves as the new mainstream source of information for millions of young men, and, according to a new Bloomberg analysis, used their perch to rally these constituents in support of Trump and the political right.

In an effort to understand the media diet of a generation, Bloomberg watched and analyzed over 2,000 videos from nine prominent YouTubers.

Reporters reviewed nearly 1,300 hours of footage from their channels, mapped out the podcasters’ guest networks and quantified the frequency of key political messages that they distributed to tens of millions of subscribers each day.

To hear them tell it, America is in a desperate place, destabilized by soaring inflation, migrants streaming across the border and the beginnings of a third world war. Gender politics have gotten out of hand while schools and the medical establishment duped the public. The same messages were communicated in Trump’s inaugural address on Monday. Now that Trump is back in power, the broadcasters are well-positioned to help build support for his political agenda, transforming grievances into policy that could have lasting effects even beyond Trump’s term in office.

In the months leading up to election, hosts had more politicians and pundits on their shows and discussed the issues more frequently. Of the broadcasters’ videos that reached over 1 million views on YouTube during the time span Bloomberg reviewed, more than a third of videos mentioned voting or the US elections — often with the host explicitly calling on listeners to vote.

None of the broadcasters style themselves as political pundits, and their conservative talking points were sandwiched between free-wheeling discussions of sports, masculinity, internet culture, gambling and pranks — making the rhetoric more palatable to an apolitical audience. Still, their popularity is sparking a “very big sea change in terms of who are the voices that matter,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Platforms Inc. chief executive officer, said in a conversation with Rogan published Jan. 10. “There’s this wholesale generational shift in who are the people who are being listened to.”

According to Edison Research, close to 50% of people over the age of 12 listen to a podcast monthly. Rogan’s three-hour interview with Trump in late October drew about 50 million views on YouTube.

Zuckerberg, for his part, recently loosened Meta’s policies on Facebook and Instagram to allow more of the type of rhetoric that’s common among the podcasters, such as disparagement of transgender people. He added Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, who encouraged Trump to join as a guest on such podcasts, to Meta’s board. Elon Musk, the owner of X, has made product changes to allow longer video streaming, in support of podcasters — and joined several as a guest himself. Google, meanwhile, wants to work through some Republican perceptions of its liberal bias and show that YouTube has already long been popular with conservatives, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking.

Over the weekend before the inauguration, many of the podcasters were coveted guests at parties hosted by YouTube, Spotify and other organizations. YouTube declined to comment. Spotify said “podcasts offer candidates a direct and influential way to engage with their audiences,” noting that both Trump and Democratic rival Kamala Harris took advantage of the medium.

With the podcasters’ audiences skewing about 80% male on average, according to people familiar with the shows’ listener demographics, the hosts connected directly to a voting bloc that helped propel Trump back to the White House. Of the 903 podcast guests tracked by Bloomberg in the past two years, only 106 people, or 12 percent, were women.

Men, and particularly white men, have long made up Trump’s core support base. But in November’s election, young men swung especially hard to the right. More than half of men under 30 supported Trump, according to the AP VoteCast survey of more than 120,000 voters, though outgoing President Joe Biden won the group in 2020. Exit polls have shown that Trump received more support from young men than any Republican candidate in more than two decades.

“We definitely helped with the young male vote,” Kyle Forgeard, a member of the Nelk Boys, said in an interview. “On the podcast, we just speak our mind, try to be true to ourselves and say what we think.”

Above all, the broadcasters described American men as victims of a Democratic campaign to strip them of their power — a comforting message to a disspirited audience. These days, young men are lonelier than ever, with those aged 18 to 23 the least optimistic about their futures, and having the lowest levels of social support, according to Equimundo’s 2023 State of American Men report. Trump and his allies showed up for young men in the places where they were already spending their time — and supplied them with answers.

Trump is expected to continue prioritizing the broadcasters once the administration gets underway, treating them like an “alternative press corps,” said Aaron Ginn, CEO of AI infrastructure startup Hydra Host, and co-founder of the Foundation for American Innovation, a center-right think tank for conservatives in Silicon Valley. “We are in this media environment where people want to authentically know somebody, and when they feel like they authentically know somebody they feel like they can trust them more,” Ginn said.

Bloomberg reviewed two years’ worth of episodes from the nine shows, from Nov. 1, 2022, to Nov. 21, 2024. Each of the channels reviewed caters to predominantly male audiences, has at least 1 million subscribers, had Trump as a guest ahead of the 2024 US election and reaches large audiences through YouTube. Though the hosts use other services to distribute their content, YouTube now outpaces Spotify and Apple Inc. for podcasts. According to recent surveys from the Pew Research Center, more than 90% of US adults aged 18-49 use the site; 75% of American teens report that they visit daily.

The typical format of the shows is a longform interview with a guest. Reporters found that the guests are often famous personalities with broad cultural appeal, including athletes, musicians, comedians, entrepreneurs and internet influencers. The content is billed as entertainment for men.

Trump’s appearances drew significant viewership across the shows. His interviews were the No. 1 episodes by view count for the majority of the programs tracked by Bloomberg in the past two years. Altogether, the nine episodes with Trump as a guest drew more than 100 million views.

Trump’s personality and history are compatible with the programs’ messaging on masculinity, according to Alice Marwick, director of research at the Data & Society Research Institute. “It’s like, don’t be ashamed of your base manly desires. Don’t let anyone make you feel guilty, don’t let anyone take you down,” she said. “You should be proud and strong, and you should also go after the people criticizing you.”

On the shows, hosts connect to their audiences using humor and vice, and provide a framework for viewers on navigating their world, including their relationships with women, work and popular culture. They challenge institutions, reinforce old-fashioned gender roles and glorify men who appeared to have fallen out of favor with the public. Ahead of the presidential election, the shows naturally championed Trump — a convicted felon running for president who survived multiple assassination attempts.

Trump’s often-combative messaging also aligns with what succeeds on YouTube.

“The easiest route these days to viewership is by creating enemies,” said Mike Majlak, a co-host of the Impaulsive podcast, in July 2023. “It’s me against the world. I’m the little guy standing up for what’s right, against the corporations, against the government greed, against Chuck Schumer. If you want to find a white knight, look to me. I’m your f – – – ing guy.”

A year later, Trump was a guest on Impaulsive, calling immigrants “terrorists” and stating that if he had been president, “the Russia attack on Ukraine would have never happened.”

The male-oriented podcasts tracked by Bloomberg each have their own style of show. Theo Von often discusses substance abuse issues and childhood experiences with his interviewees, while Lex Fridman focuses on expert opinions and tech topics. Shawn Ryan chats with people associated with military and law enforcement, saying he exposes the inner workings of the US government. Logan Paul, the Nelk Boys and Adin Ross tend to focus on humor, sports, pranks and creator drama.

Of the programs reviewed, The Joe Rogan Experience, Flagrant by Andrew Schulz and The PBD Podcast by Patrick Bet-David follow the most typical host-and-interview talk show format, discussing news and popular culture, all while challenging political correctness. The hosts largely do not push back against their guests’ ideas. Von, Rogan and Schulz are also comedians, and they often recast controversial content as edgy humor.

Yet even as the podcasts have tried to brand themselves uniquely, similar themes and characters appear across the network. Bloomberg’s analysis of 2,002 episodes across the shows reveals how closely interconnected the podcasters’ relationships are, and how much the shows’ talking points overlap. Over the past two years, 152 guests made an appearance on at least two of the shows. Recurring characters are common, not just as guests, but as “friends of the shows,” including the UFC CEO White and comedian Shane Gillis. The effect gives viewers a sense of being inducted into a virtual, close-knit friend group from home.

Appearing as a guest on multiple shows doesn’t always mean successfully grabbing the audience’s attention. According to Bloomberg’s analysis, the onetime presidential candidate and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the most frequent guest across the shows in the last two years. But it wasn’t great for business. Kennedy ranked as the 25th most popular guest by number of views, Bloomberg’s data show.

The top guests by number of views across the network reveals what kind of content resonates the most with the broadcasters’ audiences. The professional kickboxer and self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, who is currently under investigation by Romanian authorities for allegedly trafficking minors and money laundering, holds the second-highest viewership on the podcasts overall despite appearing in only three shows, according to Bloomberg’s analysis. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who appeared on six of the nine channels tracked by Bloomberg, ranked third by number of views, according to the analysis, followed by tech billionaire Musk.

Although politicians and pundits make up only 15% of all guests, they make up 30% of the most-viewed guests. Vice President JD Vance, and Trump allies Vivek Ramaswamy and Kennedy made appearances on several shows.

As the election drew closer, more politicians and pundits were invited onto the podcasts and livestreams, showing how the channels became more explicitly tied to politics. By the time Trump made the rounds on the shows, the audience was primed to take action in the election.

Some Channels Had Few, If Any, Political Guests Until Just Before the Election

Guests who appeared on each channel sized by the number of views, from Nov. ’22 to Nov. ’24

Number of Views100K1M10M

PBD Podcast

The Joe Rogan Experience

Shawn Ryan Show

Lex Fridman Podcast

Adin Live

FULL SEND PODCAST

FLAGRANT

This Past Weekend

IMPAULSIVE

ElectiondayTrumpTrump

In one popular video on Ross’ YouTube channel, Tate, far-right political pundit Nick Fuentes and internet personality Sneako, whose real name is Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy, repeated white supremacy talking points, including espousing the notion of a “great replacement” — the racist conspiracy theory that elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to disenfranchise white Americans.

That video garnered upwards of 1.2 million views on YouTube. Tate, Fuentes and De Balinthazy have all been banned from the platform, but a policy loophole allows them to be interviewed as guests on popular channels. YouTube declined to comment.

Other popular videos include an interview between podcast host Bet-David and Thomas Rousseau, the founder of Patriot Front, a white supremacist group, and Rogan’s interview with Musk, in which Musk spread a debunked theory of undocumented immigrant voters swaying the US election.

Bloomberg also analyzed over 600 videos with more than a million views each to see how broadcasters discussed political topics. In reviewing the videos, reporters found that the hosts and their guests repeatedly touched on the same themes.

In two-thirds of the videos, broadcasters discussed voting, immigration, people identifying as transgender, institutional medicine, war or the economy. The topic choices speak to issues of power, control and identity that men face, Marwick said. They “are very much about reaffirming young men’s sense of self and their place in the world, and what their place should look like,” she said.

Voting was the most frequently mentioned political topic among the highly viewed videos, with mentions appearing in 37% of the episodes that Bloomberg reviewed.

In half of those videos, hosts raised questions about elections, including casting doubt on democratic processes and on the results of the 2020 US presidential vote. YouTube began to explicitly allow discussion of the “big lie” — the falsehood that the results of the 2020 US election were due to widespread voter fraud — after a controversial policy change in June 2023.

In the remaining half of videos on voting and elections, broadcasters struck the opposite tone, saying people should trust the process and vote. They endorsed presidential candidates, urged their audiences to register to vote, and described America in a state of crisis, with participation in the election being the solution to people’s problems.

After voting, war was the most mentioned issue, appearing in 33% of highly-viewed videos. Broadcasters, who tended to be anti-war and isolationist, discussed geopolitics and global conflict, including pontificating about the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas wars. They also speculated about foreign adversaries, including North Korea and China. In eight out of nine shows, hosts and guests painted Trump as a peacekeeper, pushing the idea that there were no wars when he was serving as US president. The US was involved in armed conflicts overseas at that time.

Broadcasters also mentioned transgender identity in roughly 3 out of 10 videos, with hosts Bet-David and Rogan discussing the topic in more than half of their most-viewed videos. The podcasters and their guests — particularly comedians — often portrayed trans people as aberrant, and reinforced ideas of a gender binary.

Thirty percent of videos discussing transgender identity also mention children. Hosts criticized public schools for letting children explore their gender identity, and staunchly opposed gender-affirming care for minors. According to the American Medical Association, physicians providing gender-affirming care are bound by their ethical duty to act in a patient’s best interest, and clinical guidelines help them carefully consider whether care is medically necessary for improving the physical and mental health of patients.

In one April 2024 discussion on Fridman’s show, the former US Representative Tulsi Gabbard argued that advocating for the rights of transgender individuals infringed on the rights of women. “They,” said Gabbard, referring to Democrats, “are actively pushing for boys who identify as girls to compete against girls in sports. Changing our language so that the word woman, the identity of being a woman, is essentially being erased from our society.” As she spoke, Fridman, dressed in his signature dark suit, listened intently.

The arguments have already built support for sweeping policy changes across the nation. In 15% of videos mentioning transgender identity, hosts also mentioned sports, arguing that it is inappropriate for transgender and intersex athletes to compete. In January, House lawmakers passed a Republican-led bill that would prohibit federally funded schools from allowing transgender students to participate on sports teams that align with their gender identity. Meanwhile, 26 states have enacted laws or policies limiting youth access to gender-affirming care, with 24 states imposing professional or legal penalties on health care practitioners that provide such care, according to recent data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

On Monday, after being sworn in as president, Trump signed a pair of executive orders declaring that the US government would recognize only two sexes, male and female, and that it would end the “radical and wasteful” diversity, equity and inclusion programs of federal agencies.

Other topics including vaccine skepticism, immigration, and how difficult it is to get by in today’s economic climate each appeared in about a fourth of all the videos reviewed by Bloomberg.

Matt Fitzgerald, a 35-year-old stonemason from a suburb of Boston, started listening to Rogan during the Covid-19 pandemic. He said he now listens to more than a dozen podcasts, including by Von and Bet-David, most of which he discovered through Rogan and his guests.

Once a registered Democrat who voted for President Barack Obama, Fitzgerald supported Trump in 2016 and has stuck with him ever since. Fitzgerald said he is better informed because of the podcasts he listens to. “I started listening to Rogan, and he has on all types of different guests from different walks of life,” he said, noting guests who said they were lifelong Democrats until recently. “It kind of opened my eyes a little bit to what was going on.”

Kurtis Gunther, a 35-year-old Californian, said he voted independent, but Vance’s appearance on the Rogan show tempted him to support the Trump ticket. “It’s absolutely crazy that all we get from most politicians is soundbites and short clips,” Gunther said. “I thought JD Vance was an idiot and a weirdo based on how the internet talks about him and the few little things that we hear from interviews or stories… And I listened to his interview… and it just gave me a totally different perspective on the guy.”

Kevin Cooper, the 31-year-old Republican party chair of Miami-Dade County, which in November turned red for the first time in decades, said Trump’s appearances on podcasts challenged Harris’ portrayal of him as a threat to democracy. “You get there and he’s like ‘No, I love America, and I want to make it better,’” Cooper said.

Since the election, the creators have continued making videos along the same themes — with increasing leeway from the platforms on content that used to be against the rules. Meanwhile Rogan, the Nelk Boys, Von, Fridman and Bet-David floated from event to event throughout the inauguration and preceding weekend. Rogan posted a photo depicting him, UFC CEO White and Trump at a formal event, and, on Inauguration Day, an image of the US Capitol calling the swearing in of the president “surreal.”

“We’ll do the next one in the White House,” Forgeard said in an October podcast episode, as the Nelk Boys said their goodbyes to the former president and the interview wrapped up.

“We’ll do it,” Trump agreed.

Methodology

Bloomberg News analyzed nearly 1,300 hours of video from nine popular podcasters and streamers on YouTube over the past two years to map their guest network and identify the key political topics they discuss.

Selection criteria

Bloomberg selected Adin Live, The Joe Rogan Experience, the Full Send Podcast, the PBD Podcast, This Past Weekend with Theo Von, the Shawn Ryan Show, the Lex Fridman Podcast, Flagrant, and Impaulsive based on:

Style of Show: prominently features longform unedited interviews
Guests: interviews with President Trump over the past two years
Size: at least 1 million subscribers on YouTube
Audience: hosts are men and their audience is majority male, according to people familiar with listener demographics.

Logging and categorizing guests

Bloomberg logged guests from YouTube videos uploaded between Nov. 1 2022 and Nov. 21 2024 from the 9 channels. We excluded clips from longer videos and promotional videos.

Bloomberg analyzed metadata collected from the YouTube Data API and watched videos to confirm 903 guests across 2,002 videos.

To categorize each of the guests, we looked at their primary profession, Google’s categorization of them, as well as the context in which they appeared as a guest.

Political Pundit: Commentators, cultural critics, political strategists, political writers, and internet personalities whose primary role is punditry.

Politician: Anyone who has run for office, holds a position in a political party, has served in public office, or represented their country in official capacity.

Influencer: Professional streamers, gamers, YouTubers and online personalities.

Celebrity: Actors, musicians, TV hosts, and models. Includes musicians spanning up-and-comers to Grammy Award-winners.

Some categories are self-explanatory, such as Comedians, Intellectuals and Athletes.

Other: any guest who didn’t fit any of the previous categories.

Lastly, we noted which guests were women.

See all 903 guests, how we categorized them, and viewership from each channel on GitHub.

Limitations

Episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience before June 2024 have inaccurate publication dates on YouTube, so we referred to Spotify uploads instead. Episodes were not found on YouTube for Patrick Bet-David, Hulk Hogan, Andy Stumpf, Tony Hinchcliffe, Ric Flair, Dr. Dobra Soh, Russell Brand, Killer Mike, and Adam Curry. We counted their appearances on the show, but were unable to analyze their views.

In Nov. 2022, the Nelk Boys declined to post their second interview with Andrew Tate to avoid getting a strike from YouTube, so we noted views from a copy published by a fan account.

Adin Ross does not produce episodes. Instead, reporters analyzed a subset of livestreams and clips from Kick and Twitch uploaded to YouTube. Guests are often not listed, so reporters recorded guests by watching each video. Results are subject to human error.

Topic Analysis

To identify the political topics that broadcasters and their guests discuss, Bloomberg analyzed 1264 hours of video and transcripts from 603 videos with over 1 million views.

Reporters identified six recurring political topics discussed by hosts and guests, including politicians such as Donald Trump. We identified keywords to search transcripts for each topic, then watched associated video clips to verify mentions of each topic. Reporters labeled 2,927 passages and their associated topics in total.

Transgender: Hosts discuss identities outside of the binary notion of gender. We specifically tracked mentions of sports and children as subtopics.

Immigration: The US Southern border, immigration policies, and what that means for the socio-political hierarchy. We tracked mentions of crime as a subtopic.

Institutional Medicine: The Covid-19 pandemic, Big Pharma, and public health.

War: Modern warfare and geopolitics. Broadcasters are broadly against American foreign intervention. We tracked when Trump is referred to as a peacekeeper.

Economy: Inflation, taxes, the price of common goods, the job market, and tariffs.

Voting & elections: We tracked subtopics of calls for political participation such as registering to vote and endorsing candidates, as well as questioning election integrity.

Percentage of videos from each broadcaster that mention each topic

See more data on GitHub.

Limitations

The percentage of videos for each topic is an underestimate, as some relevant clips use language that differs from what we used for our keyword search. To get a sense of how many videos we may have missed, reporters manually reviewed 50 videos that were not flagged for a political topic. We found that 32% of videos mentioned at least one political topic.

Acknowledgements

We thank Danielle Lee Tomson (University of Washington), Andy Guess (Princeton University), and Brian Friedberg (Harvard University) for comments on an earlier draft of our methodology.

Edited by: Sarah FrierYue Qiu Data Lead: Leon Yin With assistance from: Sarah FrierJeff Kao