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Sitting in a plush sofa chair next to a variety pack of Happy Dad hard seltzer, Donald Trump was having a grand time. It was mid-October, and Trump was on the set of Six Feet Under, a wrestling podcast hosted by Mark William Calaway, better known as the former WWE star the Undertaker—laughing awkwardly at a joke about the former wrestler having forgotten the number of wives he’d had.
“This is the Donald Trump that people don’t get to see,” the Undertaker said. “I know you’ve got that tough-guy persona, and that bravado, but this is good, this is fun…. You’ve made politics fun again.”
Trump’s appearance on Six Feet Under—which now has almost 700,000 views on YouTube alone—was his 100th podcast interview, according to the Podchaser database, almost all of them in the past two years. It’s part of an unorthodox media strategy that analysts say is surprisingly well conceived.
Podcast audiences have evolved since the start of the pandemic, according to Gabriel Soto, the senior director of research at Edison Research, a firm that’s been tracking podcast data since 2006. While audiences are still disproportionately composed of people with higher degrees and incomes—urban liberal types—recent years have seen an influx of podcasts for listeners without college degrees and, in particular, younger men. More importantly, Edison’s research over the summer found that 19 percent of regular podcast listeners were undecided voters.
That’s an obvious target for the Trump campaign, which has homed in on undecided and politically disengaged young men as a key demographic in its effort to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris.
“It’s very simple: these are people who could vote, potentially, and are not your regulars watching TV news or even Fox News, but they do tune in to these emergent podcasts,” a Republican strategist close to the Trump campaign said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss behind-the-scenes strategy. “When you’re in prime-time television, you’re limited to the things you can say, and you’ve got to brush up on your statements. But when it comes to a podcast, many times it’s a more casual environment where you can express what your favorite pizza is and make yourself more relatable to the American people.”
This may especially be true for the sorts of podcasts and digital shows that Trump has been drawn to lately, as his campaign has made a concerted effort to reach younger men who vote inconsistently, if at all. These low-propensity voters, as they’re known, tend not to consume much traditional news; they do, however, consume exactly the kinds of shows where Trump has recently appeared: Andrew Schulz’s comedy podcast Flagrant; The Joe Rogan Experience; and the sports-themed Bussin’ with the Boys, hosted by the former NFL players Will Compton and Taylor Lewan. The interviews are typically jocular and casual, and rarely focused on the finer points of policy. And the audiences—not to mention the hosts—are disproportionately male. (Rogan’s show, which is the most popular podcast in America, has 17.3 million subscribers—80 percent of whom are male, according to Edison.)
Kamala Harris has embarked on a similar strategy in recent weeks, appearing on the typically apolitical podcasts of former NFL player Shannon Sharpe and the social scientist Brené Brown. Harris’s recent appearance on Call Her Daddy, Alex Cooper’s pop-culture and sexuality podcast, drew notice from the political press for Harris’s defiant response to Republican attacks on childless women (“this is not the 1950s anymore”), but its real impact may have been with the sizable portion of the audience who were undecided or politically disengaged. (Call Her Daddy began as a podcast hosted by the bro-y, conservative-leaning Barstool Sports empire. Republicans make up 24 percent of her listenership, with independents accounting for another 20 percent, according to Edison.)
“It’s a very targeted method to reach these people,” said the Republican strategist, who acknowledged that the Call Her Daddy appearance was “a smart move.”
“It’s almost like a family,” Soto said of the community formed around these shows. “You can fire up your favorite app, fire up your favorite show, and go directly into the topics that matter to you. And that intimacy provides this fast and easy way to connect with the host.”
Listeners of these podcasts are learning things about Trump they may not have known before. On the comedian Theo Von’s show, This Past Weekend—which ranks ninth on the overall charts and number five among men eighteen to thirty-five— the former president spoke about his late brother Fred Jr.’s battle with alcoholism. (When a troupe of Canadian American pranksters known as the Nelk Boys—8.2 million YouTube subscribers—followed Trump onto his campaign plane, they discovered that alcohol is not available onboard.) On Bussin’ with the Boys, Trump talked about his experiences playing youth football.
The unpredictable nature of these interviews, and the hosts themselves, also means that Trump’s conversations come with some risk. Schulz, the host of Flagrant, laughed out loud at Trump when he described himself as a “mostly truthful person”—the kind of response he’s unlikely to get in the staid environment of network television. And during his three-hour appearance last week on The Joe Rogan Experience, the otherwise affable host seemed to occasionally grow frustrated when Trump gave long, rambling answers to specific questions. “Your weave is getting wide,” Rogan said at one point—a reference to the term Trump has coined to describe his meandering answers—as Trump attempted to respond to a question about tariffs. (Trump also praised Robert E. Lee and said he would like to be a “whale psychiatrist.”)
But for the most part, the appearances are likely to have worked with their target audience.
“It does have this legitimating effect, possibly, for a lot of undecided or apolitical voters,” said Abraham Josephine Reisman, the author of the 2023 book Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America, of Trump’s appearance on Six Feet Under. “It’s not like anybody’s going to be introduced to Donald Trump through the Undertaker’s podcast. But one thing that might endear them to him is the fact that Trump is a wrestling fan like they are, which comes across in that podcast.”
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