I followed Trump and Joe Rogan into the manosphere – and it was not pretty | Zoe Williams

The former president speaks like a man who has been hypnotised, his subconscious just gaping open ...

According to Forbes, Donald Trump talked about five important things in a three-hour-plus podcast with Joe Rogan: whether the 2020 election was stolen; whether Kamala Harris was a “low IQ person”; whether he trusts polls; whether there is life on Mars (some “great pilots” have seen “things, sir, that were very strange” and “there’s no reason not to think that Mars and all these planets don’t have life”); and whether he would, if elected, eliminate federal income tax (he might). The New York Times highlighted the same points, adding a meandering discussion about the environment, where Trump suggested that environmental regulations were just a scheme to enrich consultants.

The BBC, meanwhile, took away seven points: most of the above, plus what Trump considers his biggest mistake (hiring the wrong people during his presidency, “neocons or bad people or disloyal people”); his own state of health (“unbelievable” – he meant in a good way); foreign affairs (he said to Kim Jong-un: “Little Rocket Man, you’re going to burn in hell,” but they got on fine after that, because that’s how little rocket men like to be spoken to). The BBC also included a segment on The Apprentice: how NBC tried to talk Trump out of running for president, not because it feared he might be unfit and dangerous, but because it wanted to keep the show on the road.

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