About midway through former President Donald Trump’s recent conversation with Theo Von, a mulleted comedian from Louisiana who hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the U.S., an improbable thing happens: Trump takes an interest in the interior life of another person. Rather than ramble about one of his pet subjects—bloodthirsty criminals flooding the southern border; Joe Biden being the worst President in American history—Trump listens, with genuine curiosity, as Von, a former addict, talks about doing cocaine. “You don’t anymore?” Trump asks him. “The thing you go back to then is alcohol?” Von then explains that drinking instigates the desire to do coke. “Is that a good feeling?” Trump asks. Von says that it’s a miserable one.
Has Trump ever seemed as riveted by someone as he does in this exchange? The main ways we’ve consumed him over the past nine years of his political life—cable-news interviews, rally speeches, and, when he actually does them, debates—could never have produced such a strange, sudden moment of candor. To momentarily curb his prefab MAGA scriptures and racist dog whistles, Trump needed to exit the realm of the overtly political—which, apparently, meant sitting with a giggly, goateed standup comedian. The hour-long interview offered a window into Trump’s emotional life, if only for a moment. “I never had a cigarette, and I’ve never had a glass of alcohol,” Trump tells Von at one point. “I could conceivably be the type of personality that would have—like you—that would have a problem.” Trump cites his older brother Fred’s struggle with alcoholism as a reason for never touching the stuff. Von peppers him with follow-ups, furtively nodding along to the ex-President’s breathless monologues. At one point, he calls Trump “homie.”
Von’s disarmament of Trump demonstrates why conversation podcasts have come to rival traditional forms of media—a reality that both Presidential candidates seem to recognize. When a public figure sits across from a podcast host to embark on a purportedly shapeless, stream-of-consciousness chat suffused with crude jokes and senseless tangents, an odd alchemy occurs: the speakers begin to sound like pals bantering at a pre-game, with the listener as a silent confidant. Like social-media platforms, which promise users’ constant connection and inexhaustible entertainment, podcasts promote a world where you never have to be alone, where every silence can be filled by familiar and friendly voices. (As the editors of n+1 wrote, in 2019, “This is why we love podcasts: they are the internet for our ears. Now we can be on the internet all the time.”)
Compared with the fast-and-free ethos of the conversation podcast, traditional interview formats can feel especially rigid, particularly those associated with Presidential politics. Take, for example, Kamala Harris’s interview on “60 Minutes” on Monday. She played the part of soon-to-be Commander-in-Chief, issuing well-worn truisms about investing in small businesses and the middle class (“small businesses are part of the backbone of America’s economy”), and offering frustratingly vague insights into America’s negotiating power with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (“the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region”). The day before, Harris went on “Call Her Daddy,” a sex-and-relationships podcast, previously under Barstool Sports, that is currently the most popular podcast on Spotify among women, with many listeners under the age of thirty-five. On the show, Harris went in-depth on policy while also aiming to be an affable, jovial hang. Amid discussions of alleviating the housing crisis and safeguarding women’s reproductive rights, she chuckled at host Alex Cooper’s many quips, eased back in her chair, and summoned sharp one-liners about how women should not aspire “to be humble.” On social media, many people seemed eager to see the Vice-President in a more casual setting: as Josef Adalian, an editor at Vulture, wrote on X, “I learned far more about her in 45 minutes than in any of the interviews she’s done with mainstream outlets.”
Source: Call Her Daddy / YouTube
“You have traditional television, which is getting a little bit older and maybe less significant,” Trump said on the research scientist and tech influencer Lex Fridman’s eponymous podcast last month. “From a political standpoint, you have to find out what people are doing, what they’re watching, and you have to get on.” Harris made a similar point on “Call Her Daddy,” when Cooper asked what had motivated her to go on the show: “One of the best ways to communicate with people is to be real, and to talk about the things that people really care about,” Harris said. “This is a moment in the country and in life where people really wanna know they’re seen and heard, and that they’re part of a community, that they’re not out there alone.”
In addition to going on Cooper’s show, Harris recently appeared on the basketball podcast “All the Smoke,” and on Howard Stern’s radio show. By pairing these appearances with more standard fare (she also spoke with Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper this week), Harris’s media strategy is faintly redolent of Barack Obama’s 2012 Presidential campaign, in which he spliced traditional media obligations with unconventional interviews, such as sitting down with the sports columnist Bill Simmons and talking about the N.B.A., or mentioning his favorite workout songs and ideal superpower while on a New Mexico morning-radio show. Over all, Harris has been much more press-shy than Obama—and most Presidential candidates in general—leading to speculation that her podcast interviews are a way of doing press without being challenged or confronted. The Times noted that several of these shows “are considered to be friendly to her, or at least far less probing than a traditional news interview would be.” (Even Stern, who is known for being a shock jock, has emerged as a more typical resistance lib in recent years, and his interview with Harris was quite warm.) But merely reaching the audience is likely more important than the interview questions themselves. By going on shows like “Call Her Daddy” and “All the Smoke,” Harris is able to appeal to some of the demographics that she needs to turn out for her in November: young adults, women, and Black Americans among them.
Trump, meanwhile, has appeared on several seemingly apolitical yet right-wing-coded shows that have given him the opportunity to communicate directly to a young, terminally online, male audience. These shows include “Full Send,” a program hosted by the Nelk Boys, a collection of pranksters and hard-seltzer salesmen; “Impaulsive,” which is fronted by the YouTuber turned professional wrestler Logan Paul; “Flagrant,” a multi-host podcast led by the comedian Andrew Schulz; and the live stream of the Gen Z Twitch star Adin Ross, which included Ross gifting Trump a Rolex and a Tesla Cybertruck. (A potential violation of federal campaign-finance law, it turns out.) During these interviews, Trump ran through his usual talking points, going long on his “perfect” pre-COVID Presidency and how the country, since Biden and Harris’s wrongful takeover, has entered a state of despotic disrepair. Crucially, these podcasts also afford Trump the opportunity to engage in what he once called “locker-room talk,” which includes overtures into golf, professional fighting, U.F.O.s, and his opinions on the rapper Ice Spice. (“Who the hell is Ice Spice?” he asked the Nelk Boys.) These interviews position Trump less like an anti-democratic demagogue and more as a former fraternity president visiting his grandson’s pledge class, responding to dull, doe-eyed questions with sage-like wisdom.
